The Death of Picasso Read online

  So there was to be no gossip about Hwan of Ch’i, or Wan of Tsin. So the duke asked politely:

  —How may a ruler attain and express benevolence?

  —He should regard his people as his charges and not with contempt.

  —Am I one, the duke asked slyly, who might be so benevolent?

  —Yes.

  —How?

  —Let me tell you about a duke. I had this from Hu Ho. A duke was sitting in his hall when he saw a man leading an ox through the door. The duke asked why, and was told that the ox was to be slaughtered, to anoint a ceremonial bell with its blood. Just so, said the duke, but don’t do it. I cannot bear the fear of death in its eyes. Kill a sheep instead.

  —This is a thing I did, the duke replied. You have learned of things in my court.

  —Yes, Meng Tze said with a smile. And I see hope for you in it. It was not the ox but your heart you were sparing.

  —The people thought otherwise. They said I begrudged an ox. Qi is but a small dukedom, but I can afford the sacrifice of an ox. It had such innocent eyes and it did not want to die.

  —And yet you sent for a sheep. You knew the pity you felt for the ox. How was the sheep different?

  —You make a point, the duke said. You show me that I scarcely know my own mind.

  —The minds of others, rather.

  —Yes. You are searching for compassion in me, aren’t you? In The Book of the Odes it is written the minds of others I am able by reflection to measure. You have seen why I spared the ox and was indifferent to the misery of the sheep. I did not know my own mind.

  —If, Meng Tze said with great politeness, you will allow me to play that lute there by the bronze and jade vessels, I will sing one of the most archaic of the odes, as part of our discourse.

  The duke with correct deference asked him by all means to sing it.

  Meng Tze, finding the pitch, sang:

  The world’s order is in the stars.

  We are its children, its orphans.

  Cicadas shrill in the willows.

  It is not fault, it is not guilt

  That has brought us to this. It is

  Disorder. We were not born to it.

  The autumn moon is round and red.

  I have not troubled the order,

  Yet I am no longer in it.

  In the first waywardness we could

  Have gone back. In the second we

  Began to confuse lost and found.

  Had we been angry to be lost,

  Would we have taken disorder

  For order, if any had cared?

  Cicadas shrill in the willows.

  There was a time we had neighbors.

  The autumn moon is round and red.

  Men without character took us

  Into the marshes, neither land

  Nor river, where we cannot build.

  Order is harmony. It is

  Innovation in tradition.

  The autumn moon is round and red.

  Elastic words beguiled our ears.

  What is the courage worth of fools?

  Cicadas shrill in the willows.

  Fat faces and slick tongues sold

  Us disorder for real estate.

  The autumn moon is round and red

  The young lord’s trees are tender green.

  Saplings grow to be useful wood.

  Hollow words are the wind blowing.

  Cicadas shrill in the willows.

  There was a time we had neighbors.

  The autumn moon is round and red.

  10

  The dove is over water in Scripture: over the flood with an olive twig in its beak, the rainbow above; over the Jordan with Jesus and John in it, upon the sea as Jonah (which name signifieth dove), up out of the sea as Aphrodite (whose totem animal it was). It was the family name of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

  The horse is the body, its stamina, health, and skills. The hound is faith and loyalty. But symbols are not sense but signs.

  Mencius’s Chinese cock (tail the color of persimmons, breast the color of the beech in autumn, legs blue) and unimaginable Chinese dog have become under Concord skies a biblical dove, a Rover, and a bay horse. The one is a pet, one is a friend, one is a fellow worker.

  We lose not our innocence or our youth or opportunity but our nature itself, atom by atom, helplessly, unless we are kept in possession of it by the spirit of a culture passed down the generations as tradition, the great hearsay of the past.

  11

  Thoreau was most himself when he was Diogenes.

  12

  One ship speaks another when they pass on the high seas. There is a naval metaphor in the paragraph (misprinted as spoken to in modern ignorance). Thoreau and his brother John had sailed around the world in August of 1839, all on the Concord and Merrimac, and you could see him in his sailboat on the Concord with a crew of boys, or the smiling Mr. Hawthorne, or the prim Mr. Emerson.

  CONVERSATION

  The mouse, who left abruptly if Thoreau changed from one tune to another on his flute, was a good listener.

  —A man who is moral and chaste, Mr. Thoreau said to the mouse, does not pry into the affairs of others, which may be very different from his own, and which he may not understand.

  —Oh yes! said the mouse. But the affairs of others are interesting. You can learn all sorts of things.

  —The housekeeping of my soul may seem a madman’s to a Presbyterian or a bear.

  The mouse twitched his whiskers. Offered a crumb of hoe-cake, he took it, sitting on Mr. Thoreau’s sleeve, sniffed it, and began a diligent chewing.

  The mouse knew all about the lead pencils and their inedible shavings, the surveyor’s chain, the Anakreon in Greek (edible), the journal with pressed leaves between the pages, the fire (dangerous), the spider family in the corner (none of his business), but it was the flute and the cornmeal that bound him to Mr. Thoreau. And the friendliness.

  14

  The man under the enormous umbrella out in the snow storm is Mr. Thoreau. Inspecting, as he says. Looking for his dove, his hound, his horse.

  15

  Diogenes was an experimental moralist. He found wealth in owning nothing. He found freedom in being a servant. He discovered that owning was being owned. He discovered that frankness was sharper than a sword. If we act by design, by principle, we need designers. Designers need to search. Mr. Thoreau discovered that the dove is fiercer than a lion when he sat in the Concord jail, like Diogenes. Why should a government come to him to finance its war in Mexico and pay a clergy he could not listen to? Let them find their own money. Let them write laws an honest man can obey. He would write his sentences. That was his genius. Others might find them as useful as he found Diogenes’s. The world is far from being over. When Mr. Emerson came to the jail and said, Henry, what are you doing in here? And he replied, Rafe, what are you doing out there? The words slipped loose like a dove into the spring sky, and were remembered in a London jail by Emmeline Pankhurst, in a South African jail by Mohandas Gandhi, in a Birmingham jail by Martin Luther King, and cannot be forgotten.

  MEADOW

  I remember years ago breaking through a thick oak wood east of the Great Fields and descending into a long, narrow, and winding blueberry swamp which I did not know existed there. A deep, withdrawn meadow sunk low amid the forest, filled with green waving sedge three feet high, and low andromeda, and hardhack, for the most part dry to the feet then, though with a bottom of unfathomed mud, not penetrable except in midsummer or midwinter, and with no print of man or beast in it that I could detect. Over this meadow the marsh-hawk circled undisturbed, and she probably had her nest in it, for flying over the wood she had long since easily discovered it. It was dotted with islands of blueberry bushes and surrounded by a dense hedge of them, mingled with the pannicled andromeda, high chokeberry, wild holly with its beautiful crimson berries, and so on, these being the front rank to a higher wood. Great blueberries, as big as old-fashioned bullets, alternated, or were
closely intermingled, with the crimson hollyberries and black choke-berries, in singular contrast yet harmony, and you hardly knew why you selected those only to eat, leaving the others to the birds.

  17

  This text has been written first with a lead pencil (graphite encased in an hexagonal cedar cylinder) invented by Henry David Thoreau. He also invented a way of sounding ponds, a philosophy for being oneself, and raisin bread.

  W.E.B. DUBOIS

  Lions have no historians.

  WITTGENSTEIN

  If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

  20

  Fear not, thou drummer of the night, we shall be there.

  THE DEATH OF PICASSO

  Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek:

  GERMINAL, FLORÉAL, PRAIRIAL 1973

  12GERMINAL

  Anderszins 2 april. Fog until almost noon. Wild glare in lakes over the sea. It has been but a month from putting in the eight-by-threes, treated with creosote and laid a foot and a half apart in the long northernish rectangle of our cabin’s base, construction fir let into grey marl on the chine of an island, to the last sheet of shingling on the roof. An island that, as Archilochos said of his Thasos, lies in the sea like the backbone of an ass, Thasos a ridge of primrose marble in the wijndonker Zee, our Snegren a hump of old red sandstone in the cold North Sea. Plain as a shoebox, it is little more than a roof, chimney, and windows. The Eiland Commissaris did not bat an eyelash when I registered it under the name Snegren, grensbewoner being the allusion he supposed. Sander has already coined snegrensbewoner, Erewhonian pioneer. If I had explained that it is nergens reversed, he would have made a joke about so remote and lilliputachtig an island being precisely that, nowhere.

  Parmenides is wrong: the nothing he will not allow to be is time itself. Time is the empty house that being inhabits. It may well be the ghost of something in the beginning, before light became matter. But it went away, so that something could be.

  13 GERMINAL

  Coffee, journal, a swim with Sander, just enough to count as a bath, the water Arctic. We built the Rietveld tensegrity table, razored labels off window-panes, squared things away so that for the first time the long room begins to look like home, practised Corelli on our flutes, Telemann and Bach. Baroque progressions, the wind, the waves. Thoreau had a flute at Waldenpoel I think.

  14 GERMINAL

  Vincent’s Stilleven met uien. It is the first painting he did after cutting off part of his ear according to the Sint Mattheus Evangelie. In a rage at Gauguin, a blusterer like Tartarin de Tarascon. They had a kind of marriage, those two, a companionship as chaste as that of the apostles Paulus and Barnabas. All their talk was of color and form, of motif and theme. But Gauguin would talk of the hot girls upstairs over the café and Vincent would stop his ears, and rage, and pray, and resort to Raspail’s camphor treatments to ward off impurity. To talk of the Christus only generated blasphemies in Gauguin. What indulgence in the flesh did to the creative spirit was what syphilis did to the flesh itself; worse, to the mind. And Gauguin only laughed and called him a big Dutch crybaby.

  The painting is a resolution, a charting of the waters after almost foundering. A drawing board in a room at Arles. It is as if we have zoomed in on a table top that had hitherto been a detail in all the scenes of Erasmus writing, of Sint Hieronymus with his books. The two things that are not on the board are a bottle of white wine and a jug of olive oil. The board is a bridge from one to the other.

  The doctor’s diagnosis of Vincent’s hot nerves was based on learning that Vincent’s diet for some weeks had been white wine and his pipe. Malnutrition! Look, mon vieux, anybody who subsists day after day on cheap wine and shag tobacco is going to cut off his ears. Nervous prostration: it is no wonder that you are out of your mind.

  And in Raspail’s Annuaire de la santé, there on the drawing board, the book that broke the doctors’ monopoly and placed a knowledge of medicine in every humble home, it explains the nutritiousness of onions and olives, the efficacy of camphor in preventing wet dreams and lascivious thoughts.

  The candle is lit: hope. Sealing wax: for letters to Theo. Matches, pipe, wine.

  The letter is from Theo. It is addressed Poste Restante because Theo knew that Vincent had been turned out of his house. The postman, whose portrait Vincent had done, would know where he was. That is the postman’s mark, the numeral 67 in a broken circle. The R in an octagon means that it is a registered letter: it contained a fifty-franc note.

  There are two postage stamps on the letter, one green, one blue. The green one is a twenty-centime stamp of the kind issued between 1877 and 1900. The numeral 20 is in red. The only other French stamp with which Vincent’s block of color might be identified is a straw-colored twenty-five centime one with the numeral 25 in yellow. Since the other stamp on the letter, however, is definitely the fifteen-centime of the same issue and is the only other blue stamp in use at the time, the post office in Paris would have affixed a forty-centime stamp to the letter rather than a fifteen and a twenty-five. There was no thirty-five centime denomination.

  So unless the bureau had run short of the forty-centime denomination and unless petty exactitude is a new thing in French post offices, the stamps are the blue fifteen centimes, and green twenty-centime issues current at the time.

  The design on both, which Vincent made no attempt to indicate, was an ornate one: numeral in an upright tablet before a globe to the left on which stood an allegorical female figure with bay in her hair and bearing an olive branch. To the right, Mercurius in winged hat and sandals, and with the caduceus.

  A harmony in gold and green.

  15 GERMINAL

  The Vincent Onions is the center of a triptych I think I have discovered. Vincent’s chair, with pipe, is the right-hand piece, Gauguin’s empty chair, the left-hand.

  Sun burned through the fog quite early, and we rowed around the island in a wide loop, Sander stark naked. I had better sense: he was splotched with strawberry stains under the remnant of last year’s tan, goose bumps all over. He stuck it out, though rowing with a will. In a blanket before a fire the rest of the morning.

  16 GERMINAL

  Warmer, and with an earlier lifting of fog. Even so, Sander turned out in jeans and sweater, sneezing. Vrijdagheid als kameraadschap maar dubbelzinnig genoeg: men moet een gegeven knaap niet in het hart zien. Caesar and Pompey look very much alike, especially Pompey. Sint Hieronymus with lion, breath like bee balm. Grocery lists, supplies. Reading Simenon: the perfect page for the fireside. Maigret is comfortable in a constant discomfort, wrapped in his coat, cosseted by food and his pipe.

  In the post that old Hans had for us: Manfredo’s Progetto e Utopia, with a note to say it will for the most play into my hands but has vulnerabilities (he means Marxist rhetoric) that I will go for with, as he says, my Dutch housekeeping mind. And Michel’s Cosmologie de Giordano Bruno. Sander remarks that Italian looks like Latin respelled by an English tourist. Letters from Petrus and Sylvie, wondrous dull. Clerical humor, but it’s worth knowing that Bergson went around calling the American pragmatist William Jones.

  17 GERMINAL

  Schubert’s second quartet on the radio, fine against the mewing of gulls and the somber wash of the sea. A Soviet trawler in the channel.

  Worked all day, off and on, at the iconographica. Neumann on Greek gesture, Marcel Jousse, Birdwhistell. Painter feels the body of the sitter as he works, two mimeses. Open hand in David, beauty of legs in Goya. Watch contours and see what else they bound other than the image we see: thus Freud found the scavenger bird. Philosophical rigor of moralists: Goya, Daumier, van Gogh. It has taken a century for drama to catch up with the painters. A line through Moliére, Callot, Jarry, Ionesco. Themes refine, become subtle and articulate from age to age: children who will become artists brood in window seats on art they absorb into the deep grain of their sensibilities: Mr. Punch and Pinocchio in the lap of Klee become metaphysical puppets in a series of caprichos to Mozart rather than the Spa
nish guitar.

  Sander maps the island with compass and sighting sticks, reinventing geography and surveying.

  18 GERMINAL

  We hear on the radio that Picasso is dead. He was ninety-two.

  19 GERMINAL

  Sander in Padvinder boondoggle and Bike skridtbind rings the island double time. At the outcrop on the promontory he must scuttle up and spring down. The rest of his circumference is shore, shale, pebble, sand, his pace lyric and sweet. Ah! he gasps at the end of it, down on elbows and knees, panting like a dog. Ah is an undictionaried word implying joy, rich fatigue, accomplishment, fulfillment. How many such words are missing from the lexicon: the gasp after quenched thirst, the moo at finding food good, bleats and drones of sexual delirium, clucks, smacks, whistles, mungencies, whoops, burbles.

  I ask why the boondoggle, out of waggish curiosity. I get a gape and stare and something like a bark. Patches of the young mind remain animal and inarticulate, not to be inspected by sophistication, such as a grave study of toes, heroic stretches on waking, the choice of clothes, the pleased mischief, lips pursed, eyebrows raised, of padding about in the torn and laundry-battered blue shirt only, tumescens lascive mentula praeputio demiretracto.

  Een herinnering: Bruno at Sounion. August. Columns of the Poseidonos Tempel sublime and Ciceronian, purest blue the sky, indigo charged with lilac the sea, a brightness over all, light as clean as rain, every texture, stone, cicada, thorn, shards, pebbles, exact and clear. Vile Germans leaving as we arrived, laughing over some rudeness to a family of kind Americans. Two ironic French adolescents, boy and girl, playing at being amused by their own boredom. They shambled away. Another batch arriving, we could see, at the awful restaurant down the hill, adjusting cameras and sunglasses for the climb. Bruno set the reading on our camera and handed it to me. Pulled his jersey, then, over his head, schadelijk, bent and unlaced his sneakers, peeled off his socks, stepped out of his jeans, doffed his briefs, unbuckled his wristwatch. There are tourists coming, I said. One, he said, arms folded and legs spread. Two: at easy attention by a pillar. Three: sitting, elbows on knees, a frank and engaging look into the lens. Om godswil! I cried. O antiek wellustigheid! he sang back. Four: profile, hands against a column. Er vlug mee zijn! Golden smile, glans roused and uncupped, left hand toying with pubic clump, right fist on hip. People, Japanese and British, Toyota executives and bottlers of marmalade, rounded the corner of the temple. Bruno into jeans as an eel under a rock, into shirt, buttoning up cool as you please as the first foreign eyes found him. Into socks and sneakers as they passed. British lady stared at his briefs lying on brown stone in brilliant light, their crop dented, convex, feral, male. Reached them over, slapped them against his thigh, and stuffed them in his pocket. And what in the name of God was all that? Grieks, he said.