855: The top sheet . . .
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 35 continues
The top sheet was blank. I turned it aside. I began flipping through the others. On the sheets were figure studies in pencil and charcoal. The drawings seemed to be the work of several hands, but only two models seemed to be represented: Margot and Martha. I saw them there, even though they were distorted in a fascinating variety of ways.
Andy watched me anxiously. “Well?” he asked with a note of urgency.
In a flash, I decided that I knew what this was. It was a test. He wanted to see how accustomed I was to viewing Margot and Martha, barely draped, as they were in the drawings. If I recognized them too easily, my goose was cooked. I wasn’t going to fall for that.
“I—um—I’m not sure—”
“They’re drawings of Margot and Martha,” he said. “By some of my students.”
“No kidding?” I said. I squinted at the drawings, turned them, held them to the light.
“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “You can see the girls, if you look past the way they’ve been represented, or misrepresented.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I can.” I arranged several drawings on the table and compared them. “I think I can, anyway.”
“All right,” he said. He sighed and added, “This is turning out to be a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. Let’s see—ah—as you know, I give lessons.” He indicated the evidence with a wave of his hand. “But—”
He paused. He looked at the door.
“Trust, remember?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Okay. I will now confess to you something that I’ve hidden from everyone but Rosetta.”
“Look,” I said, rising, “maybe I’m not the right person to tell this to.”
“I think you are,” he said. He held his hand out toward me and lowered it slowly, to indicate that I should sit and hear him out. I sat. “Peter,” he asked, “do you remember when I asked you to draw your favorite animal?”
“Yes.”
“I had a reason, as you’ll see in a minute.”
He drew a long breath. We both looked at the door.
“You see,” he said, “some time ago I discovered that I don’t want to make paintings anymore—or drawings—or anything. I couldn’t even remember why I originally wanted to do it.”
I thought of reminding him about the Bat, but he rushed on without giving me an opening.
“So I decided to teach—not because I thought that I had anything to give my students, but because they might have something to give me.”
I didn’t understand, but I thought it was best not to say anything unless he really seemed to want me to, since I still wasn’t sure what he wanted from me.
“Somehow,” he went on, “I thought I might get it back that way, whatever it was that was missing. Or I might at least be able to remember what it was. I wanted to observe other people who were drawing and painting. I wanted to try to find out why they did it and why they wanted to do it. I suppose I really wanted to find out why I had done it, to see if I could remember what had made me want to do it.”
He paused and looked at me in a way that made me think he now wanted me to say something, but now I had no idea what to say to him. If he was asking for some sort of advice or solace, I certainly didn’t know how to give it to him. An embarrassing silence grew between us. At last, Andy broke it.
“Well, an amazing thing happened. While I was watching my students at work, I noticed that when I would put something in front of them, like an orange, they would look at it, and they would try to draw it, but each of them would wind up with a drawing of some other orange, as if they all had eye trouble or something, as if they couldn’t see what was right in front of them. I kept asking myself why that happened. I couldn’t get it off my mind.”
He looked at me again in that way that invited a response, so I said, “Wow.”
“All right,” he said, nodding, “here comes the important part. One day I had put an apple there in front of them, right there on that table. I told them, ‘Go to it—draw that apple.’ They got started, and while I was waiting for them to produce something I could look at, I was so distracted that I picked up the apple, and while I was walking around, looking at the work, I started eating it. They all went right on drawing as if nothing had changed. I was eating the apple, and they were all drawing apples, as if the apple were still there on the table. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“I think so,” I said. “They were drawing the apple that they remembered.”
“They were drawing all the apples they remembered, and they were drawing apples they hadn’t even seen yet, and they were drawing the apples they imagined when they heard somebody say, ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away.’ You see what I mean?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, since then, this has become my real occupation. I’m trying to find out what people see when they look at something.”
“Mm.”
“I won’t bore you with the details,” he claimed. “Let’s just say that what began as a kind of desperate study became an obsession. I became obsessed with a small but pregnant notion: that every representation is a misrepresentation—an inadequate attempt to replicate an ideal residing in a collective consciousness.”
“Gosh.”
“There’s an equivalent of this idea in linguistics,” he said, and the thought crossed my mind that he had stopped seeing me as the little boy he taught to draw on Saturday mornings and was seeing me as the ideal audience he’d been seeking ever since he ate that apple. “It’s the notion that every articulation of a speech sound is an imperfect actualization of an ideal sound that all the speakers of a language hold in their collective understanding of the language, and there’s proof that this ideal actually exists, even though it’s never uttered, because it’s always imperfectly uttered. Can you guess what that is?”
“Hmm,” I said, as if the answer had been lost, along with most of my knowledge of linguistics, during the time I’d spent locked in the studio, breathing turpentine fumes.
“It’s the fact that people who speak the language can understand one another,” he said triumphantly. “Their imperfect articulations are good enough to allow their listeners to find the corresponding ideal speech sound in their unconscious understanding of the language, and since there’s a meaning associated with each ideal sound, there you have it—understanding, even though the utterance is imperfect.”
“Huh,” I said.
I don’t know how close I came to articulating the ideal huh in the collective unconscious of native speakers of English, but it must have been close enough for Andy to understand me, because he frowned and said, “Well, maybe that’s too complicated. Okay, never mind about that. Let me try another example.” He thought for a moment, apparently trying to decide what sort of example I would understand. “It’s like classical statuary,” he ventured.
“Oh, sure,” I said, since I didn’t want to disappoint him twice.
“All right,” he said, with renewed enthusiasm. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
He rubbed his hands together. “So there I was, smitten with an antique desire, a classical desire: I wanted something perfect. But where classical statuary is the idealized representation of an unattainable perfection, an ideal assumed to reside elsewhere, beyond the human mind, I wanted to know about the ideals within the human mind.”
“Like those speech sounds,” I said, and when I said it I was surprised to discover that I had, almost in spite of myself, been following what he’d said.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said now. “That’s it. I had become obsessed with archetypes. I wanted one. I wanted to track one down and capture it. I needed a way to go hunting for archetypes.”
Another pause, but this one was of a more dramatic nature.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 855, Mark Dorset considers Philosophical Concepts: Noumenon and Phenomenon; and Language: Linguistic Concepts: Langue and Parole from this episode.
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