Rabih Alameddine - I, The Divine

David always came up with excuses for not attending any of the openings. He did show up for a reception in San Francisco, after I had nagged him for weeks about it. It was on a Thursday night, and that was not our night. He begged off, hinting over and over about other plans. I was surprised when he showed up. He stayed for about twenty minutes. We barely talked as I was busy with other people. He waved at me when he came in, walked around the gallery, and left without saying good-bye. For a long time after that I had to hear about how I had ignored him.

David’s disillusion with my art matured slowly, reaching its apex with the emergence of Baba Blakshi. Baba was my response to the hypocrisy of the art world. She was never meant to grow, burgeon, and mature. A local gallery put out a call for entries in an exhibit called “Apparitions.” The curator wanted artwork dealing with the concept of visions, apparitions, and materialization of icons. I am not sure why the idea intrigued me, not being anything I would usually have considered, but from the moment I read the advertisement in the art magazine, my mind was overwhelmed with possibilities. I proposed two pieces; both were accepted. The first was the now-infamous Jesus-on-a-Tortilla. I had a local printer make a metal plate with an embossed line drawing of Jesus, taken from Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns, a painting after Guido Reni at the National Gallery in England. I had wanted a Michelangelo Christ, but the Reni had the exact insufferable suffering look I loved so much. I heated the plate and threw flour tortillas on it. The result was a stack of Jesus-on-Tortillas. This, of course, was a reference to a true story from 1978, about a woman in New Mexico who was frying her tortilla and saw the picture of Jesus on it. She had it framed. Believers arrived by the bushel from around the world to glimpse the epiphany. I gave the world a whole stack. The second piece, Jesse-in-My-Toilet was a little more intricate. I had to have a plumber build it for me. I used an actual toilet bowl, with an internal pump to recycle the water. I had black light installed under the toilet’s rim, which turned on when the toilet was flushed. Inside I had someone paint a portrait of Jesse Helms that could only be seen when the black light was on. Hence, whenever the toilet was flushed, a barely visible picture of Jesse appeared.

David did not appreciate my pieces. He suggested this could be the end of my serious artistic career; no respectable curator would take my paintings seriously if I presented a toilet as art. I explained Duchamp and the urinal, Fountain. I was not doing anything particularly new or shocking. I simply thought it was amusing. I told David I would not enter the pieces with my name, since I had no interest in them being associated with me. I would come up with a silly name, like Duchamp did, a joke name. I came up with Baba Blakshi. My serious painting would not be affected (I was wrong, of course, but for reasons different from the ones David mentioned).

The pieces were not only the hit of the exhibit — the other works in the show were childish — they were talked about for months afterward. There was more interest in the works of Baba Blakshi than there ever was in those of Sarah Nour el-Din. What I thought was a joke took on a seriousness all its own. Baba ridiculed the hypocrisy of the art world and the perfidious art world swallowed Baba up.

If I were to do it again, I would not have given birth to Baba. I allowed myself to be carried away by the attention directed toward Baba, thinking it innocuous. Slowly, but surely, I began to bestow upon Baba’s work a respect it did not deserve. Baba pervaded my life, every aspect of it. Cynicism is a cruel, parasitic mistress. It seduces; like a succubus, it drains its flunky of any creative energy, redirecting all toward its own survival. Baba was nothing if not cynicism incarnate. No wonder she flourished.

I never had control of Baba, nor did she ever remunerate my efforts. Most of her work was difficult to sell (with the exception of Jesse-in-My-Toilet, which sold in an instant for more money than any other “piece” of art I had produced). Since Baba was ephemeral, she received more attention than her creator. I finally lost Baba a year and a half ago, at my last exhibit. To further a joke that was no longer amusing, I asked a few artists to come up with Baba works. They produced a number of pieces which the gallery liked more than my originals. My Baba exhibit included nothing of mine. She is going strong somewhere now, but has nothing to do with me. The art world still loves Baba, although she does not ridicule hypocrisy much anymore. Baba’s work has become less funny and more cruel, a natural progression.

I lost David during the transition from Sarah to Baba. He did not leave me because of it, but there was never any doubt that he disapproved vehemently of Baba. He considered her tacky, classless, and contemptible. I cannot blame him for that.

As a young girl, I always felt my life was being filmed for posterity. I thought of myself as an actress in a documentary or a piece of cinéma verité. I imagined myself being the subject of a future episode of This Is Your Life. I even practiced it. I sat in front of the mirror, trying on different facial expressions. Shock at being considered worthy of a retrospective of my fabulous life, surprise for when they called my elementary school teacher, tears for when they called my mother, Janet, and glee for when they called my father.

The practice sessions stopped as I grew older, of course, but my self-focus never allowed me to diverge from the belief that my life must be recorded.

Goethe said:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it;

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

I begin.

If I were to write our love story, no one would believe it. My real-life story is unbelievable. I tell my friends, but they dismiss my love for you as puerile, inconsequential. I tell them what happened and they consider me foolish. Perhaps I never manage to convey how much I loved you. I say it: I love you. I love you so much, my heart aches, a physical hurt. But what does it mean really? Words, nothing but words. If I could show them how much I loved you, how much I love you still, they might see why I stayed, how I let the story unfold. If I could show them, I would be able to explain how I let the cruelest man in the world destroy any remaining dignity I might have had.

So how? How can I describe to a passerby the way I felt about you? I can’t tell stories of what we did together. We did nothing. We never went anywhere, an entire relationship spent in my bed not having sex. Do I describe in loving prose how you look? Do I tell how you held me, how I felt in your arms? I don’t know how. It would have to be something different. I can talk about how it felt when I knew it was over.

In front of a painting. That’s how I knew. Titian. The Flaying of Marsyas . Apollo killed the satyr Marsyas by skinning him alive. His muscles exposed, every vein and sinew seen. Repulsive. Left with nothing to hang on to, no honor, no decency, shamed. I opened myself to you only to be skinned alive. The more vulnerable I became, the faster and more deft your knife. Knowing what was happening, still I stayed and let you carve more. That’s how much I loved you. That’s how much.