Part 5 (2/2)
”Now, how come Grandpa was so right? How does he read me so well? Am I fickle, too shallow? No, I have been too deeply in love too many times. Can I help it if I love Beauty, and the beauties I love do not have enough Beauty? My eye is too demanding; it cancels the urgings of my heart.”
THE Ma.s.sACRE OF THE INNER SENSE.
The entrance hall (one of twelve) which Chib enters was designed by Grandpa Winnegan. The visitor comes into a long curving tube lined with mirrors at various angles. He sees a triangular door at the end of the corridor. The door seems to be too tiny for anybody over nine years old to enter. The illusion makes the visitor feel as if he's walking up the wall as he progresses towards the door. At the end of the tube, the visitor is convinced he's standing on the ceiling.
But the door gets larger as he approaches until it becomes huge. Commentators have guessed that this entrance is the architect's symbolic representation of the gateway to the world of art. One should stand on his head before entering the wonderland of aesthetics.
On going in, the visitor thinks at first that the tremendous room is inside out or reversed. He gets even dizzier. The far wall actually seems the near wall until the visitor gets reorientated. Some people can't adjust and have to get out before they faint or vomit.
On the right hand is a hatrack with a sign: HANG YOUR HEAD HERE. A double pun by Grandpa, who always carries a joke too far for most people. If Grandpa goes beyond the bounds of verbal good taste, his great-great-grandson has overshot the moon in his paintings. Thirty of his latest have been revealed, including the last three of his Dog Series:_ Dog Star_, _Dog Would_, and _Dog Tiered_. Ruskinson and his disciples are threatening to throw up. Luscus and his flock praise, but they're restrained. Luscus has told them to wait until he talks to young Winnegan before they go all-out. The fido men are busy shooting and interviewing both and trying to provoke a quarrel.
The main room of the building is a huge hemisphere with a bright ceiling which runs through the complete spectrum every nine minutes. The floor is a giant chessboard, and in the center of each square is a face, each of a great in the various arts. Michelangelo, Mozart, Balzac, Zeuxis, Beethoven, Li Po, Twain, Dostoyevsky, Farmisto, Mbuzi, Cupel, Krishnagurti, etc. Ten squares are left faceless so that future generations may add their own nominees for immortality.
The lower part of the wall is painted with murals depicting significant events in the lives of the artists. Against the curving wall are nine stages, one for each of the Muses. On a console above each stage is a giant statue of the presiding G.o.ddess. They are naked and have overripe figures: huge-breasted, broad-hipped, st.u.r.dy-legged, as if the sculptor thought of them as Earth G.o.ddesses, not refined intellectual types.
The faces are basically structured like the smooth placid faces of cla.s.sical Greek statues, but they have an unsettling expression around the mouths and eyes. The lips are smiling but seem ready to break into a snarl. The eyes are deep and menacing. DON'T SELL ME OUT, they say. IF YOU DO ...
A transparent plastic hemisphere extends over each stage and has acoustic properties which keep people who are not beneath the sh.e.l.l from hearing the sounds emanating from the stage and vice versa.
Chib makes his way through the noisy crowd towards the stage of Polyhymnia, the Muse who includes painting in her province. He pa.s.ses the stage on which Benedictine is standing and pouring her lead heart out in an alchemy of golden notes. She sees Chib and manages somehow to glare at him and at the same time to keep smiling at her audience. Chib ignores her but observes that she has replaced the dress ripped in the tavern. He sees also the many policemen stationed around the building. The crowd does not seem in an explosive mood. Indeed, it seems happy, if boisterous. But the police know how deceptive this can be. One spark . . . .
Chib goes by the stage of Calliope, where Omar Runic is extemporizing. He comes to Polyhymnia's, nods at Rex Luscus, who waves at him, and sets his painting on the stage. It is t.i.tled _The Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents_ (subt.i.tle:_ Dog in the Manger_).
The painting depicts a stable.
The stable is a grotto with curiously shaped stalact.i.tes. The light that breaks -- or fractures -- through the cave is Chib's red. It penetrates every object, doubles its strength, and then rays out jaggedly. The viewer, moving from side to side to get a complete look, can actually see the many levels of light as he moves, and thus he catches glimpses of the figures under the exterior figures.
The cows, sheep, and horses are in stalls at the end of the cave. Some are looking with horror at Mary and the infant. Others have their mouths open, evidently trying to warn Mary. Chib has used the legend that the animals in the manger were able to talk to each other the night Christ was born.
Joseph, a tired old man, so slumped he seems backboneless, is in a corner. He wears two horns, but each has a halo, so it's all right.
Mary's back is to the bed of straw on which the infant is supposed to be. From a trapdoor in the floor of the cave, a man is reaching to place a huge egg on the straw bed. He is in a cave beneath the cave and is dressed in modern clothes, has a boozy expression, and, like Joseph, slumps as if invertebrate. Behind him a grossly fat woman, looking remarkably like Chib's mother, has the baby, which the man pa.s.sed on to her before putting the foundling egg on the straw bed.
The baby has an exquisitely beautiful face and is suffused with a white glow from his halo. The woman has removed the halo from his head and is using the sharp edge to butcher the baby.
Chib has a deep knowledge of anatomy, since he has dissected many corpses while getting his Ph.D. in art at Beverly Hills U. The body of the infant is not unnaturally elongated, as so many of Chib's figures are. It is more than photographic; it seems to be an actual baby. Its viscera is unraveled through a large b.l.o.o.d.y hole.
The onlookers are struck in their viscera as if this were not a painting but a real infant, slashed and disemboweled, found on their doorsteps as they left home.
The egg has a semitransparent sh.e.l.l. In its murky yolk floats a hideous little devil, horns, hooves, tail. Its blurred features resemble a combination of Henry Ford's and Uncle Sam's. When the viewers s.h.i.+ft to one side or the other, the faces of others appear: prominents in the development of modern society.
The window is crowded with wild animals that have come to adore but have stayed to scream soundlessly in horror. The beasts in the foreground are those that have been exterminated by man or survive only in zoos and natural preserves. The dodo, the blue whale, the pa.s.senger pigeon, the quagga, the gorilla, orangutan, polar bear, cougar, lion, tiger, grizzly bear, California condor, kangaroo, wombat, rhinoceros, bald eagle.
Behind them are other animals and, on a hill, the dark crouching shapes of the Tasmanian aborigine and Haitian Indian.
”What is your considered opinion of this rather remarkable painting, Doctor Luscus?” a fido interviewer asks.
Luscus smiles and says, ”I'll have a considered judgment in a few minutes. Perhaps you'd better talk to Doctor Ruskinson first. He seems to have made up his mind at once. Fools and angels, you know.”
Ruskinson's red face and scream of fury are transmitted over the fido.
”The s.h.i.+t heard around the world!” Chib says loudly.
”INSULT! SPITTLE! PLASTIC DUNG! A BLOW IN THE FACE OF ART AND A KICK IN THE b.u.t.t FOR HUMANITY! INSULT! INSULT!”.
”Why is it such an insult, Doctor Ruskinson?” the fido man says. ”Because it mocks the Christian faith, and also the Panamorite faith? It doesn't seem to me it does that. It seems to me that Winnegan is trying to say that men have perverted Christianity, maybe all religions, all ideals, for their own greedy self-destructive purposes, that man is basically a killer and a perverter. At least, that's what I get out of it, although of course I'm only a simple layman, and . . .”
”Let the critics make the a.n.a.lysis, young man!” Ruskinson snaps. ”Do you have a double Ph.D., one in psychiatry and one in art? Have you been certified as a critic by the government?
”Winnegan, who has no talent whatsoever, let alone this genius that various self-deluded blowhards prate about, this abomination from Beverly Hills, presents his junk -- actually a mishmash which has attracted attention solely because of a new technique that any electronic technician could invent -- I am enraged that a mere gimmick, a trifling novelty, can not only fool certain sectors of the public but highly educated and federally certified critics such as Doctor Luscus here -- although there will always be scholarly a.s.ses who bray so loudly, pompously, and obscurely that . . .”
”Isn't it true,” the fido man says, ”that many painters we now call great, Van Gogh for one, were condemned or ignored by their contemporary critics? And . . .”
The fido man, skilled in provoking anger for the benefit of his viewers, pauses. Ruskinson swells, his head a bloodvessel just before aneurysm.
”I'm no ignorant layman!” he screams. ”I can't help it that there have been Luscuses in the past! I know what I'm talking about! Winnegan is only a micrometeorite in the heaven of Art, not fit to s.h.i.+ne the shoes of the great luminaries of painting. His reputation has been pumped up by a certain clique so it can s.h.i.+ne in the reflected glory, the hyenas, biting the hand that feeds them, like mad dogs . . .”
”Aren't you mixing your metaphors a little bit?” the fido man says.
Luscus takes Chib's hand tenderly and draws him to one side where they're out of fido range.
”Darling Chib,” he coos, ”now is the time to declare yourself. You know how vastly I love you, not only as an artist but for yourself. It must be impossible for you to resist any longer the deeply sympathetic vibrations that leap unhindered between us. G.o.d, if you only knew how I dreamed of you, my glorious G.o.dlike Chib, with . . .”
”If you think I'm going to say yes just because you have the power to make or break my reputation, to deny me the grant, you're wrong,” Chib says. He jerks his hand away.
Luscus' good eye glares. He says, ”Do you find me repulsive? Surely it can't be on moral grounds . . .”
”It's the principle of the thing,” Chib says. ”Even if I were in love with you, which I'm not, I wouldn't let you make love to me. I want to be judged on my merit alone, that only. Come to think of it, I don't give a d.a.m.n about anybody's judgment. I don't want to hear praise or blame from you or anybody. Look at my paintings and talk to each other, you jackals. But don't try to make me agree with your little images of me.”
THE ONLY GOOD CRITIC IS A DEAD CRITIC.
Omar Runic has left his dais and now stands before Chib's paintings. He places one hand on his naked left chest, on which is tattooed the face of Herman Melville, Homer occupying the other place of honor on his right breast. He shouts loudly, his black eyes like furnace doors blown out by explosion. As has happened before, he is seized with inspiration derived from Chib's paintings.
”Call me Ahab, not Ishmael.
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