William Vollmann - The Atlas

But there have been other houses of joy in the world; every neighborhood has one; the gazetteer is riddled with their toponyms, although perhaps not all deserve the name. The center is where we are; thus in travelling we but change our peripheries. One traveller may rule (or be slave to) many, many worlds. And other travellers of course leave the flotsam of their extinguished secret planets and planetoids — a faded photograph, a doll, a lock of hair, a symphony, a mineral brought from who knows where, a baby, a gravestone, a pair of dirty underpants. When he met the surviving wooden panels of Gauguin's House of Joy from that dreamworld we call Oceania— les îles Marquises , to be precise (1901) — he remembered how priests had burned the rest as soon as the artist died, leaving orphaned his bas-relief girls with negroid shell-faces, idol-faces, who dwelled within the world he'd once called " Soyéz mystéieuses ." A little yellowish-green pigment remained on their faces; their hair was painted red or bluish-green; one tawny-buttocked nymph grappled at a greenish darkness, gazing at another woman's face which shone in isolation like the moon; as it seemed, the nymph supplicated and the moon gazed back at her and the traveller, tight-lipped. On the far left another woman sadly drowsed, faded like so many of Gauguin's dreams — sentimental, pornographic dreams, yet not without merit; the man wanted to be loved, let's say; he was a traveller; he wanted to possess the alien; his flaw was that he was unwilling to be possessed by it. — The other traveller would have loved to see the viewers made up of Gauguin's elect, which is to say, laughing amorous couples, but by the time people got to Gauguin upstairs in Division Forty-Four their feet hurt and they had already seen ever so many images of nakedness. A whitish-grey rainy light came in. A man rushed down the scuffed tiles, following the camera implanted at the end of his arm. A businesswoman trod dully along, half-gazing at Gauguin's panels. Her fat husband pointed to the one that said SOYEZ AMOUREUSES — VOUS SEREZ HEREUSES* (a seductive snake basking round that message), and she touched her shoulder affectionately. That was good; he was being good; but she but half looked. Nor was she to be blamed; her legs ached, held so unnaturally angled in the high heels. So she passed on to Division Forty-Five without glancing to see whether he would follow, which assuredly meant that she took his following for granted, and that was not so good. But maybe he had failed to consider the high heels. The man gazed at the moon-woman for awhile, listening to the lines of her face, and then went on. For a long time, almost a full minute, the Maison du Jouir was empty, except for the traveller. Those squat naked women waved tirelessly — joylessly, he hated to say; almost grimly; had Gauguin disbelieved his own message? If so, what an unhappy man!. . Across the hall, a glass case sheltered his head of Tehura, carved of pua wood and painted. Tehura was the first of his thirteen-year-old wives. Gauguin wrote home that her skin was "an orgy of chromes." Her shiny face was tilted back forever, her dark eyes almost pupilless holes the shape of seedpods. Light crawled upon her cheekbones and forehead. He wanted to kiss her calm, rich wooden lips. — In Division Forty-Five, smiling ladies were showing their little girls Aristide Maillol's La femme à I'ombrelle (1895). When they came to Gauguin, they peered at Tehura and the Maison du Jouir in silence. Perhaps they were hostile. Perhaps they understood what those women had been to Gauguin and they did not want their daughters to have anything to do with his joy. Perhaps they thought: Old lecher! — In Division Forty-Three, which displayed the works of the École Pont-Aven, they lingered somewhat longer, pointing out to their young females his safely unimpresive still-lives and the harsh Brittany women of his pre-Oceanic period. No danger that anyone would emulate them —and, if they did, no harm done! A landlady's calling is rarely despised. — Supposedly Tahitians, a Canadian woman explained. — His feet hurt, too. He returned to the glass case where Tehura's head lived. Behind it hung Et I'or de leur corps (1901), whose skin-hues rendered the title a misnomer, being brown rather than gold; Gauguin had achieved beautiful expressions for the two girls, whose heads were cocked in patient curiosity, seeking the traveller's eyes which they would never find. But Tehura was the one. In this new crowd there appeared to be a wave of wood-carving enthusiasts, since on his current circuit round the glass case he had leisure only to notice the shiny dark chisel-marks of her hair before eye-pressure and breath-pressure impelled him. Another orbit. That melancholy masklike thing never looked back at him. Even when he brought his head down against the glass and looked straight into her eyesockets, nothing looked back. It was not that she was nothing, only that she would not look. He was on the periphery of the world. Another orbit. This time he aimed his gaze according to a lesser anger of imperialistic intimacy, and was rewarded by her looking almost at him, her lovely, sullen lips not quite parted. Halfway through the next orbit, he glanced across the hall and saw how a crowd was grimacing at the panels of Gauguin's house. A man leaned forward and gazed at Soyez mystérieuses with respect. Another aped him, then walked away humming. What hateful and artificial places museums are! But in Division Forty-Three, a man leaned against a pillar and smiled so lovingly upon a Rousseau. That was good. — It was not (be it said) that the traveller wanted to smash the glass case and run off with Tehura's head, although that might well have been the most honest and committed thing to do. Possession is a myth. One enjoys something or someone for awhile, then ceases to enjoy, either because the loved thing is taken away or because life itself is taken away, or simply because enjoyment is taken away, at which time the fabulous head simply becomes a lump of ennui rendered in wood.

There was a yellow field of rapeseed, and then he had to change in Winnipeg.

They pulled out of Winnipeg at ten, the sky still blue but losing color, the lights on in the houses and buildings across the river. Contingent memories followed him like twin blotches of sunlight keeping a train company along the adjacent rails. Hegel writes about shapes of consciousness which have not yet attained to the perfect abstraction so dear to him; that was one way to characterize them; another was as simple crumbs and scraps one held onto, remnants of life's ceaseless giving, like the wasted golden light on the corners and in the veins of the ranked black concrete squares which floored the platform at the train station at Rome, goldness exploding upwards in tiny occasional spangles when a raindrop hit, while the black railings, though they shone as if varnished, remained still. Now the train began to move; the atlas opened, chancy shapes of light rushed down into the seams perpendicular to the direction of travel to make lines of light; then the bright entrance crept by, and then he was speeding on gravelly tracks between fences and trees, observing the widening slices of Italy between train-tracks. . There was Arabic neon under a hand-painted mouth, the yellow letters crawling like dotted inchworms, policemen in black with white belts and flat black caps and white-striped sleeves, black boots, black moustached faces (Venetian red with a touch of yellow ocher). That was Cairo. I am very disconnected, another woman he'd loved had written, and within ten minutes of your departure wondered why I hadn't called your bluff about running off to Spain. I hope that you are not too sad about everything, and will forgive me for needing things you can't give — and for wanting to — as Ivan would say— "respectfully return my ticket" alone. Being alone is very important to me. I will look into finding you some daguerreotyping equipment next week. Everybody was disconnected. Everybody retained some meaningless recollection or other, like that part of Karl-Marx-Allee with darkish apartment buildings, the Stalin Wall; when Stalin died, they took down his sign quietly in the night.