To draw what is lost

I hold a pencil to draw with. An approximation of God’s wand. Creation is creation, I insist, no matter what the scale.

My room is freezing, the view of Paris rooftops apocryphal. Romance reticulated. Thoughts become noises and arcs. I, the artist, hesitate, put on one of my last vinyl records.

Ludwig’s piano concerto crescendos. I wave the Faber-Castell 4B, drawing sounds in the air. Crashing chords, delicate trills. A waterfall of sound.

The pencil lowers towards the paper, hesitates. A cathedral stone held aloft by a cage à écureuil. Is this art? This treadmill of despair, desire.

I glance at the mirror. ‘Look on my face ye mighty and despair.’ Who is that? What hand dares transfer the self? What eye dares see? What face dares stare, dares hope, dares care?

I force the 4B towards the paper and pause. Somewhere between the eye and the hand is a fragile world. A tenor, a tenebration, of reality. Am I able? Am I allowed? Can this happen or is the earth about to quake and make every hope, every dream irrelevant?

My hand presses and draws. The graphite awakes, a form appears. God’s finger reaches towards Adam. Life warps and finds its form in one less dimension. My face appears on the page, less than human yet alive and yearning. Grey lines hesitate to express the aging beard, the mediocrity of life unfulfilled.

To draw is to extract something – a bucket from a well, a gun for a shootout. A draw is a sports match without winners. Drawing echoes loss, empty spaces, failure.  It creates space between lines. The white defined. The dark lines corral emptiness, mock certitude, lack anger.

All the world’s in a face and every face a world ill-defined.

We strive for permanence. We shudder that death shall not prevail. We desire to establish that, after the end, there is a beginning. The portrait offer us that opportunity. Gouache lives on, even beyond those who take our memory to the grave.

The self-portrait though is the ultimate self-indulgence. Indulgence both in the sense of vanity (self-evident) and the sense of the remission of sins. You will not be forgotten when the bells ring loud and your personal eternity is enabled by the bones of saints revived to repay the beneficent.

O lord (such lords as may be allowed an unbeliever), the artist mutters, may this paper with my features last forever and not shrivel, rot or burn. There are more reliable substrates but, alas, gold pages are beyond the reach of my meager coin. This paper, though, allows me a heaven removed. One remove from life, one remove from permanence.

Ah but…we hope for forever in an image and forget that permanence is just an indulgence of time. Time gives and immediately takes away. Each moment is forever gone.

The past is an eternity of loss. The future an eternity of hope.

Life is simply this moment, now gone, between loss and hope. Between commission and omission. Time cares nothing for us or our graven images. It hurls them all into an abyss of loss, a torrent of yesterdays.

I tuck an errant hair behind my ear. The pencil draws wisps onto the forehead. I am become myself, in some cluttered semblance of verisimilitude. Truth quivers in the cold air of the small, vile apartment, wafts out the window. I thought I had it snared in my hand, in the cage of my fingers, but it escaped and now the hacked graphite lines mock, deride.

Winter invites itself in and stares at my drawing, laughs crudely and stays to mock a while longer. I imagine Leonardo in Paris, the plaything of kings, drawing a double-helix staircase for Chambord and keening for the sun of Firenza. I try but cannot channel him. No genius hides down this alley-way today.

I refuse to channel Picasso, who convinced a gullible public that new had more value than good. They remain convinced, and the con-artists continue. Perhaps, today then, Kollwitz? Less line, more shade.

A sigh escapes my spurious susceptibilities and the air about me again resonates with a silent despair. The chill drifts up from the Seine and inveigles every space, every passage between unkempt cafés. It hunkers into every warm corner and makes hunger of love and compassion. It sunders any sweet laughter, any levity, and like a polar wave on an iceberg shore brings a chill and a pain that lingers. No gloves can keep the cold from stiffening the fingers, crazing the sinews. Arthritis or abnegation of the muse? Is it physical or phantasmal?

But enough of self.

I wanted us to be together. She was the muse whose delicate fingers traced her adoration on my eyelids, on this face that squares inside the mirror’s chipped frame, that stumbles on the paper like mud on a piggery floor, that despairs to be more than it is.

She, the essence of the senses who roared a lioness’s fever in my veins and was beloved of the artist, but who then decided my talent was a symptom and not a lure. That to leave was to be free - when freedom lies within the walls we build.

She could have been free! She could have gone wherever she wanted, been whoever she wanted to be in that other, different world, that world where she departed and the door closed behind her. She could have walked down into the Châtelet metro and seen the old woman drop her knitting. Picked up the needles and wool from the platform floor and handed them back to her with a timid smile. That’s how it could have been if the artist hadn’t been quite so self-centered, so ineffably intense. If she hadn’t been quite so caustic, so damnably cruel. The door never opened, though she wished it so.

Passion. The word is so ill-used these days. Corporations imagine the word can lure us to a purchase. Poor writers submit sullied copy without demur and the word means less with each pallid repetition.

Passion, you deleterious fools, is a burning fire in your innards that roars in your arteries and consumes the fiber and sense of your being. Passion drives you to distraction, to the abyss, the summit, the nadir, the anguish. It burns in your soul, that mis-expressed word for the best and worst of your being.

Passion is that gash that rips across her belly when she says she wants to leave, when she says you are not enough anymore – what? clichés? now? –  that your work is less than your urgent dreams and vivid declarations, that what was amour is now ground to dust. No more.

And then, you see, let me explain, and then, then… there is a snap in the air, a chink in the passage of time in which you find yourself unable to manage the moments, to find expression for your consummate despair. And a passion seizes your drawing hand and draws instead a seeping red sweep across the canvas on which her beauty had been re-framed. She became the object that would leave but now would not.

The sounds of seasons that urge from the earth when palpated, that purge from the canvas when cut. The susurration of leaves on a hard earth. The gush of desires into and from a welcoming and rejecting flesh, the incalculable expression of the depth of a fleeting passion that was love become despair become a cruelty beyond emotion, beyond hope, beyond the loss that overwhelms, that subsumes, buries, sighs, and stills. 

She sits over there, still posed for the portrait already drawn by my hand. I pause again in the flow of my next creation. I will be with her, I must, though I find it difficult to pose myself, and I struggle to see the person in the glass.

I will pursue the perfection that our still-life demands, a form that reflects us and makes us as real as this clumsy hand can manage. We will be together for as long as forever is allowed to last. Our fingers reach out to touch, to draw together my last, my lasting illusion.