William Gaddis: A Folic Of His Own

On the related charge of damages brought by plaintiff the standard for preliminary relief must first be addressed. Were it to be found for plaintiff that irreparable harm has indeed been inflicted upon his creation, and that adequate remedy at law should suffice in the form of money damages, in such event the court takes judicial notice in directing such claim to be made against the Village Board and the dog's master in tandem, since as in the question posed by the Merchant of Venice (I, iii, 122) 'Hath a dog money?' the answer must be that it does not. However, as regards the claim that the dog Spot, endowed with little more than milk teeth however sharp, and however extreme the throes of his despair, can have wreaked irreparable harm upon his steel confines this appears to be without foundation. Further to this charge, defendants respond, and the court concurs, citing plaintiff's original artistic intentions, that these steel surfaces have become pitted and acquired a heavy patina of rust following plaintiff's stated provision that his creation stand freely exposed to the mercy or lack thereof of natural forces, wherewith we may observe that a dog is not a boy, much less a fireman brandishing an acetylene torch, but nearer in its indifferent ignorance to those very forces embraced in the pathetic fallacy and so to be numbered among them. We have finally no more than a presumption of damage due to the inaccessibility of this inadvertent captive's immediate vicinity, and failing such evidentiary facts we find that the standards for preliminary relief have not been met and hold this point moot.

Here we take judicial notice of counterclaims filed on behalf of defendant James B seeking to have this court hold both plaintiff and the Village and other parties thereto liable for wilfully creating, installing and maintaining an attractive nuisance which by its very nature and freedom of access constitutes an allurement to trespass, thus enticing the dog into its present allegedly dangerous predicament. Here plaintiff demurs, the Village joining in his demurrer, offering in exhibit similar structures of which Cyclone Seven is one of a series occupying sites elsewhere in the land, wherein among the four and on only one occasion a similar event occurred at a Long island, New York, site in the form of a boy similarly entrapped and provoking a similar outcry until a proffered ten dollar bill brought him forth little the worse. However, a boy is not a dog, and whereas in the instant case Cyclone Seven posed initially a kind of ornate 'jungle gym' to assorted younger members of the community, we may find on the part of Spot absent his testimony neither a perception of challenge to his prowess at climbing nor any aesthetic sensibility luring him into harm's way requiring a capacity to distinguish Cyclone Seven as a work of art from his usual environs in the junk yard presided over by defendant James B's father and guardian ad litem, where the progeny of man's inventiveness embraces three acres of rusting testimony thereto, and that hence his trespass was entirely inadvertent and in good likelihood dictated by a mere call of nature as abounding evidence of similar casual missions on the part of other members of the local dog community in the sculpture's immediate vicinity attest.

In taking judicial notice of defendant's counterclaim charging allurement we hold this charge to be one of ordinary negligence liability, already found to be without merit in this proceeding; however, we extend this judicial notice to embrace that section of plaintiff's response to the related charge of dangerous nuisance wherein plaintiff alleges damage from the strong hence derogatory implication that his sculptural cr9ation, with a particular view to its internal components, was designed and executed not merely to suggest but to actually convey menace, whereto he exhibits extensive dated and annotated sketches, drawings, and notes made, revised, and witnessed in correspondence, demonstrating that at no time was the work, in any way or ways as a whole or in any component part or parts or combinations thereof including but not limited to sharp planes, spirals, and serrated steel limbs bearing distinct resemblances to teeth, ever in any manner conceived or carried out with intent of entrapment and consequent physical torment, but to the contrary that its creation was inspired and dictated in its entirety by wholly artistic considerations embracing its component parts in an aesthetic synergy wherein the sum of these sharp planes, jagged edges and toothlike projections aforementioned stand as mere depictions and symbols being in the aggregate greater than the sum of the parts taken individually to serve the work as, here quoting the catalogue distributed at its unveiling, 'A testimony to man's indiminable ls/c] spirit.'

We have in other words plaintiff claiming to act as an instrument of higher authority, namely 'art,' wherewith we may first cite its dictionary definition as '(1) Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter or counteract the work of nature.' Notwithstanding that Cyclone Seven clearly answers this description especially in its last emphasis, there remain certain fine distinctions posing some little difficulty for the average lay observer persuaded from habit and even education to regard sculptural art as beauty synonymous with truth in expressing harmony as visibly incarnate in the lineaments of Donatello's David, or as the very essence of the sublime manifest in the Milos Aphrodite, leaving him in the present instance quite unprepared to discriminate between sharp steel teeth as sharp steel teeth, and sharp steel teeth as artistic expressions of sharp steel teeth, obliging us for the purpose of this proceeding to confront the theory that in having become self referential art is in itself theory without which it has no more substance than Sir Arthur Eddington's famous step 'on a swarm of flies,' here present in further exhibits by plaintiff drawn from prestigious art publications and highly esteemed critics in the lay press, where they make their livings, recommending his sculptural creation in terms of slope, tangent, acceleration, force, energy and similar abstract extravagancies serving only a corresponding self referential confrontation of language with language and thereby, in reducing language itself to theory, rendering it a mere plaything, which exhibits the court finds frivolous. Having here in effect thrown the bathwater out with the baby, in the clear absence of any evidentiary facts to support defendants' countercharge 'dangerous nuisance/ we find it without merit. We next turn to a related complaint contained in defendant James B's cross claim filed in rem Cyclone Seven charging plaintiff, the Village, 'and other parties and entities as their interests may appear' with erecting and maintaining a public nuisance In the form of'an obstruction making use of passage inconvenient and unreasonably burdensome upon the general public' (Fugate v. Carter, 151 Va. 108,144 S.E. 483,1928; Regester v. Lincoln Oil Ref. Co., 95 ind,App. 425, 183 N.E. 693,1933). As specified in this complaint, Cyclone Seven stands 24 feet 8 inches high with an irregular base circumference of approximately 74 feet and weighs 24 tons, and in support of his allegation of public nuisance defendant cites a basic tenet of early English law defining such nuisance as that 'which obstructs or causes inconvenience or damage to the public in the exercise of rights common to all Her Majesty's subjects,' further citing such nuisance as that which injuriously affects the safety, health or morals of the public, or works some substantial annoyance, inconvenience or injury to the public' (Commonwealth v. South Covington & Cincinnati Street Railway Co., 181 Ky. 459, 463, 205 SW 581, 583, 6 A.L.R. 118, 1918). Depositions taken from selected Village residents and submitted in rem Cyclone Seven include: We'd used to be this nice peaceable town before this foreigner come in here putting up this (expletive] piece of (obscenity) brings in every [expletive] kind of riffraff, even see some out of state plates'; 'Since that [expletive] thing went up there I have to park my pickup way down by Ott's and walk all hell and gone just for a hoagie'; let's just see you try and catch a train where you can't hardly see nothing for the rain and sleet and you got to detour way round that heap of (obscenity] to the depot to get there'; 'I just always used the men's room up there to the depot but now there's times when I don't hardly make it'; They want to throw away that kind of money I mean they'd have just better went and put us up another (expletive] church.'