David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress

It is what I sometimes have instead of a rosy-fingered dawn, possibly.

Possibly the garbage disposal area is one more thing that I have never mentioned before, as well.

One would have little reason to do so, however, it being nothing more extraordinary than a hole in the ground.

It is quite a huge hole, but still.

One follows a sign, to get there.

To the Garbage Disposal Area, the sign says.

In a manner of speaking, one follows the sign.

What one is actually following is a road, of course.

Possibly I did not need to make that explanation.

My own garbage is always meager enough to be disposed of by being buried on the beach, incidentally.

I do this while taking my walks, perhaps every third time I take one.

And doubtless it goes without saying that any such garbage as had once been disposed of at the hole has long since decomposed.

So that the hole is just a hole, as I have said.

Although there is an enormous heap of broken bottles nearby.

Perhaps the latter is somewhat extraordinary, after all.

Certainly the bottles are extraordinarily pretty, being of various colors.

Too, they glisten much more dramatically than do my wet morning leaves.

In fact the entire mound of them is sometimes like a kind of glistening sculpture.

Michelangelo would not have thought so, but I think so.

Sculpture is the art of taking away superfluous material, Michelangelo once said.

He also said, conversely, that painting is the art of adding things on.

Although doubtless he would not have thought that the heap of added-on bottles is like a painting, either.

Yet it is not one hundred percent unlike a painting by Van Gogh at that, when one comes right down to it.

If one squints just a little, it is even very like a painting by Van Gogh.

It is all of those swirls in Van Gogh that I am no doubt thinking about. Such as for instance in his painting called The Starry Night.

As a matter of fact, at night is exactly when Van Gogh would have most probably chosen to paint such bottles.

Assuming there was a moon, obviously.

El Greco was fond of painting at night also, but only indoors. And one seriously doubts that El Greco would have been given inspiration by a garbage disposal area, in either case.

Actually, the bottles could be effectively done by the light of a fire, as well.

Even if it would have to be quite a large fire.

Now and again I have built fires along the beach, by the way.

This is always a pleasant diversion.

This is also not including when I have built other sorts of fires along the beach. Such as out of entire houses.

Doubtless it has generally been on an unexpectedly chilly evening in summer, when I have built the former.

Or on the first evenings when one senses that winter is finally almost ending.

Along the sand there will be frisky shadows, that will dance and fall away.

Or, if there is snow, the flames will write a strange calligraphy against the whiteness.

For the life of me, I cannot remember what I had been trying to get that nine-foot canvas up the main stairway in the Metropolitan Museum for.

Doubtless my ankle was only sprained. Though it was swollen to twice its normal size.

One never does solve what it is about watching fires, really.

Although probably where I should build my next one is at the garbage disposal area after all.

One would have never created a painting by merely lighting a match and then squinting, before.

El Greco did not care very much for Michelangelo as a painter, by the way.

For that matter Picasso did not care very much for him, either.

A good deal of Michelangelo reminded Picasso of Daumier, as a matter of fact.

One doubts that Alfred North Whitehead's little bell would have rung if he had heard Picasso saying that.

Daumier was somebody else who went blind, incidentally.

Well, as did Degas. And Monet.

And Piero della Francesca.

Although Piero della Francesca is again not to be confused with Piero di Cosimo, the latter having been the one who would hide under a table when there was thunder.

In fact the other Piero had an even worse phobia than Turner about not letting a single person ever see him at work, too.

And frequently would cook as many as fifty eggs at one time, in the same pot in which he was boiling his size, so as not to have to fret over meals.

When Maurice Utrillo was mad, he once tried to commit suicide by repeatedly hitting his head against a wall in a jail.

And in the same period when he was trying to reform Sien, Van Gogh was known to give away all of his clothes to the poor. Or to start to cry in front of churches.

Although Piero di Cosimo did have one pupil, who turned out to be Andrea del Sarto. So doubtiess he was at least sometimes agreeable enough to share some of the eggs.

Don't bother to get up, doubtless Andrea said in his turn, if it stormed during lunch period.

What Sien shared with Van Gogh was her venereal disease.

Turner grew up as the son of a barber. In a street called Maiden Lane, near Covent Garden.

Utrillo's father may have been Renoir.

Although he could just as well have been Degas.

Suzanne Valadon, who was Utrillo's mother, evidently never knew.

If Renoir or Degas knew, they evidently never said.

Andrea del Sarto has such a poetic sound for a name, when one reads it.

Although all it actually means is that his own father was a tailor.

Andrea senza errori, he was also called. What that means is that he never made a single mistake, when he was drawing.

Naturally I had to look that up too, whenever it was that I memorized it.

It saddens me to also happen to know that how Andrea died was during a plague, poor and neglected.

Although Titian died during a plague, as well. If in his case at the age of ninety-nine.

Jackson Pollock crashed his car into a tree, no more than ten minutes away in the pickup truck from where I am sitting right at this moment, on August eleventh, 1956.

I forget Pollock's birthday, on the other hand. Although doubtless it is not something I ever knew.

I had also forgotten Renoir's arthritis.

My own left shoulder has not troubled me at all lately, however.

Gauguin was one more painter who had syphilis.

Even if, had he lived during the Renaissance, he would have had to belong to the guild of pharmacists.

All painters did. This was because they compounded pigments.

On my honor, that was how things worked, then.

So possibly the drugstore I forgot to notice in Savona was not called the Savona Drugstore to begin with, but was named after Gauguin.

In Madrid, I once lived in a hotel named after Zurbaran.

Unless perhaps it was named after Goya.

And was in Pamplona.

Although what I would more seriously wish to know is why any of this is now making me think about seagulls.

Aha. Seagulls being scavengers, of course.

When I say being, I mean having been, naturally.

But which in either case was only to suggest that there surely once would have been any number of seagulls at the garbage disposal area.

One has no idea how great a number, but surely a considerable number.

Doubtless other creatures would have come and gone also, of course.

Such as dogs and cats, one imagines.

Then again, perhaps even large dogs would have been leery of that many seagulls.

Certainly cats would have been.

Unless of course there were a considerable number of cats, basically approximating the considerable number of seagulls, which one sincerely doubts.

Actually all I had in mind was a house cat or two, put out for the night.

Once, when I was painting in Corinth, New York, for a summer, I put my own cat out each night.