Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

He succeeded in breaking the engagement, in never marrying her. Cowardice was probably involved here. Kierkegaard wished to believe that the fault lay with the nature of love itself, the problem of love, its fate in his life. From the personal he extrapolated to the general. A philosopher’s trick. Regine married another man and moved away from Copenhagen to the West Indies, but Kierkegaard, the knight of faith, carried a burning torch for her, in the form of his philosophy, the rest of his days. This is madness of a complex lifelong variety. He spent his career writing philosophy that would, among other things, justify his actions toward Regine Olsen. He died of a warped spine.

Esther says that when I am seated at a dinner table, plates and food in front of me, I am transmogrified into a bore. Yak yak, she says. At the table she adjusted her watchband and raised her eyebrows to me. I felt her kicking me in the shins.

Still I pressed on.

Søren Kierkegaard maintained that everyone intuits what love is, and yet it cannot be spoken of directly. Or distinctly. It falls into the category of the unknown, where plain speech is inadequate to the obscurity of the subject. Similarly, everyone experiences God, but the experience of God is so unlike the rest of our experiences that there, too, plain speech is defeated. According to Kierkegaard, nearly everyone intuits the subtlety of God, but almost no one knows how to speak of Him. This is where our troubles begin.

At this point I noticed Bradley’s attention flagging somewhat. Esther kicked me again. She glanced toward Bradley, our new neighbor. Don’t lecture the boy, she meant.

I raised my voice to keep his attention: Speaking about God is not, I said, pounding the dinner table lightly with my spoon for emphasis, the same as talking about car dealerships or Phillips screwdrivers. The salt and pepper shakers clattered. The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up — wordless, inarticulate — by denying their existence altogether, and pfffffft, they die. (They can, however, come back. Because God is a god, when He is dead, He doesn’t have to stay dead. He can come back if He chooses to. Nietzsche somehow failed to mention this.)

Both God and love are best described and addressed by means of poetry. Poetry, however, is also stone dead at the present time, like its first cousin, God. Love will very quickly follow, no? Hmm? Don’t you agree? I asked. After God dies, must love, a smaller god, not follow?

Uh, I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it, said Bradley, our new neighbor. Do you want some dessert, Professor? I got some ice cream here in the refrigerator. It’s chocolate.

A very nice change of subject, Esther said, breathless with relief. Harry, she continued, I think you should save Kierkegaard for some other time. For perhaps another party. A party with more Ph.Ds.

She gave me a loving but boldly impatient look, perfected from a lifetime of practice. Esther does not like it when I philosophize about love. She feels implicated.

Okay, I said, I’m sorry. I get going and I can’t help myself. I’m like a man trying to rid himself of an obsession. Actually, I am that man. I’m not like him at all.

Esther turned toward Bradley Smith. Harry is on the outs in his department, she said. He does all the unfashionable philosophers, he’s a baggage handler of Bigthink. What do you do, again, Mr. Smith? You explained but I forgot.

Well, he said, I’ve just bought into a coffee shop in the mall, I have a partnership, and now I’m managing it.

This interested me because I’ve always wanted to open a restaurant.

Also, he continued, I’m an artist. I paint pictures. There was an appreciable pause in the conversation while Esther and I took this in. Would you like to see my paintings? he asked. They’re all in the basement. Except for that one — he pointed — up there on the living room wall.

Esther appeared discountenanced but recovered herself quickly.

The artwork he had indicated had a great deal of open space in it. The painting itself covered much of the wall. However, three quarters of the canvas appeared to be vacant. It was like undeveloped commercial property. It hadn’t even been compromised with white paint. It was just unfulfilled canvas. Perhaps the open space was a commentary on what was there. In the upper right-hand corner of the picture, though, was the appearance of a window, or what might have been a window if you were disposed to think of it representationally. Through this window you could discern, distantly, a patch of green — which I took to be a field — and in the center of this green one could construe a figure. A figure of sorts. Unmistakably a woman.

Who’s that? I asked.

The painting’s called Synergy #1, Bradley said.

Okay, but who’s that?

Just a person.

What sort of person? Who were you thinking of?

Oh, it’s just an abstract person.

Esther laughed. Bradley, she said, I never heard of an abstract person before. Except for the persons that my husband thinks of professionally. Example-persons, for example.

Well, this one is. Abstract, I mean.

It looks like a woman to me, Esther said. Viewed from a distance. As long as it’s a woman, it’s not abstract.

Well, maybe she’s on the way to becoming abstract.

Oh, you mean, as if she’s all women? A symbol for women? There she is, not a woman but all women, wrapped up in one woman, there in the distance?

Maybe.

Well, Esther said, I don’t like that. No such thing as Woman. Just women, and a woman, such as me, for example, clomping around in my mud boots. But that’s not to say that I don’t like your painting. I do like it.

Thank you. I haven’t sold it yet.

I like the window, Esther continued, and all those scrappy unpainted areas.

It’s not quite unpainted, he informed us. It’s underpainted. I splashed some coffee on the canvas to stain it. Blend-of-the-day coffee from the place where I work. It’s a statement. You just can’t see the stains from here.

Ah, I said, nodding. A statement about capitalism?

Esther glared at me.

You want to see my pictures in the basement? Bradley asked.

Sure, I said, why not?

Only thing is, he said, there’re some yellow jackets nesting in the walls — or wasps — and you’ll have to watch yourself when you get down there. Careful not to get stung.

We’ll do that, I said.

ABOUT THIS BASEMENT and the paintings residing there, what can I say? I held Esther’s hand as we descended the stairs. I feared that she might stumble. Wasps, likewise, were on my mind. I did not want to have her stung and would protect her if necessary. Bradley had leaned his paintings against the walls, as painters do, on the floor. Each painting leaned into another like a derelict reclining against other derelicts. He had installed a fervent showering of fluorescent light overhead. A quantity of light like that will give you a headache if you’re inclined, as I am, to pain. The basement smelled of turpentine and paint substances, the pleasant sinus-clearing elemental ingredients of art, backed by the more pessimistic odors of subsurface cellar mold and mildew.

One by one he brought out his visions.

This, he said, is Composition in Gray and Black. He held up for our inspection images of syphilis and gonorrhea.

And this, he said, is called Free Weights.

Very interesting, Esther said, scratching her nose with a pencil she had found somewhere, as she contemplated our neighbor’s abstract dumbbells and barbells, seemingly hanging, like acorns, from badly imagined and executed surrealist trees, growing in a forest of fog and painterly confusion that no revision could hope to clarify.