William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— You, she whispered, back seated on the edge of the bed, and then kicking out, — Go away egg… in a mocking voice as the coconut rolled away from her foot. She raised her eyes across the room again to the picture she'd turned from the wall; and faint under a single thin coat the Byzantine earrings showed through. -But. .

— with your eyes closed, she whispered, turning back to the bed there. — I dream and wake up. The love I have from others is not love of me, but where they try to find themselves, loving me. I drearn and I wake up, and then at that moment you are somewhere being real to other people; and they are a part of your reality; and J am not. . But you are the only person I am real with. .

She sat staring down.

— If you are the only person I am real with. .

Her eyes strayed; and suddenly she had the leather box, spilling everything but the archaic hoops of gold which she held in a hand and was up, raising and dropping her shadow across the room in an instant as she crossed and went into the bathroom.

When she came out, wearing the Byzantine earrings, there was blood on them and on her shoulders, running down in singular unpaired lines over her bared breasts, breaking where they broke away from her, mocking their slightness by assailing it, respecting their fullness by parting above the two swollen stains whose color they ridiculed in passing, down, to delineate the unbroken rising below along the sharply broken lines that her walking so quickly forced with each step, to come apart and disappear where that rising fell away in the white hollow of her thighs.

— Then with your eyes closed, she whispered, pulling a blanket from the welter of blankets over her.

The fire had died under the steady censure of the electric glare, and its emanations contended bitterly until, one by one, their poisonous violence was exhausted by such severe emergency, and left only lavender to rise and spread in a diffusion which penetrated without edge, which cut without sharpness, impetuous without haste, filling without distending as a color deepens in saturation and exalts in brilliance at once.

— Oh yes. . she whispered fiercely, — Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. .

As the fire died even the lavender became indistinct, and lay in with the smell of Venice turpentine, and stand oil, burnt photographic prints, burnt canvas and tortured gesso until, when she woke, there was neither triumph nor dissension in the air she breathed, standing, looking round her, back to the bed suddenly, and round her again.

She put on her coat, and sat on the stool where she'd got it from. She sat there for some time, almost under the light, so that her shadow lay steady and small over an irregular blow of verdigris on the floor, confining its elation within the clear and casual bounds of her retreat.

— Why did you not write to me? she said, still unmoving, not even to look toward the bed.

Then the green she had retired leaped out under the light as she stood, and began searching everywhere, pushing aside Kinder-und Hausmärchen with her foot, picking up a piece of paper, kicking Thoreau and a crumpled twenty-dollar bill, stepping on an eggshell, stooping again in a distracted pause to pick up an unopened container of indigo, kicking, again, Frank, Bishop of Zanzibar, and the broken glass, finding more paper, slipping, and almost falling in a pool of stand oil, picking up, with the same distracted pause, an unopened container of rose madder, and another piece of paper which she threw down because it was smeared on one side with blue paint, and on the other had written in large characters, semper aliquid haeret, and going on so until she had a number of pieces of paper in her hand, which she laid out on a drawing board and commenced to write with a broken penholder, and a point she got from the leather box.

— Here is the letter, she said sitting over it, and turning to look across the room. — Because you must not close your eyes now because you cannot, she said. — Because now you are alone, she said. Still looking over there she put down the broken penholder and picked up the rose madder, running her thumbnail to open it. — Because you cannot, she said, as the rose madder spilled into her hand, and she looked down at it, and shivered in the open coat.

Then she began to write. She wrote there for some time; and when she broke, between words, or in the middle of words, seldom between sentences or paragraphs, she would look over across the room, all the while, with the fingers of her left hand, applying the coarse rose madder to her lips, and the indigo around her eyes. She wrote for some time, and before she was done the rose madder was half gone, and the indigo had caked wetly round her eyes.

When the letter was finished she laid it in the middle of the floor, and looking round for something to weigh it down, found the coconut and stationed it there. Then going to the door she closed her coat, twice, each time after stooping and straightening from the floor, and went out. The crumpled twenty-dollar bill, which had stuck to her shoe with the stand oil she'd stepped in, came off before she reached the street.

Here is the letter she wrote, and left there.

You:

The demands of painting have the most astonishing consequences In my life at this moment you are one of them

Perspective since De Chirico manipulated it plastically; resolved it in his painting paradigms, now exists in the mind; a nostalgia; a co-relative isolation; a plenary; a playa, where, one must, to see the water, go immediately after the rain, and to see the broad level ground, must visit before. Painting is exquisite as the punishment for the thinker: denied the thoughts of his grave-diggers, his own death-face and his final curiosity, a vision of his bones — the skeleton: of which he was always aware, moment by moment emerging to that static release he, the thinker, cannot joyfully sit, a separated thing, shaking his bones Perhaps a heart petrified, or a brain, an eye, an unborn child, would roll deliciously inside it, to rattle there, the way a dead man rattles in the sea nor find a solution to deny all this, a solving, nor a solvent, to disappear those bones, make it an improbability the other's joy, nor to deny the priceless departure into death.

Since paintings are in the service of my desires, I can disdain no ruse to accomplish them. To paint to intensify, to remember but what could I remember here, in this place', where, in truth, I have never been before? a street of accidents all designed to happen to me?

Chroniclers, replacing instinct, become us more and more to lose our sensibilities, but, how can I refuse this slan-derous name when I shall paint, and then insist upon it?

It would doubtlessly, be kinder not to insist so, or investigate less directly, more discreetly: ask my mother, not my brain; "what sort of little girl I was?" and lover: "what woman I became" in order to define the strange significance of the avowal of these episodes of paint, like circumstance divorced from motivation

This, though, would place it, in sum, upon another level of being, every delusion of my energetic brain engages itself alone, then, in this enterprise, this demonstration of itself.

The mere coincident of materials at one's disposal cannot make a painting, nor, even a journey where nothing had been selected, nor lost by traveling, a journey, indeed, that might as well never had been taken.

To paint without means, desire or justification — a dubious use, habit sloughed away from reason or, in an indecisive moment, "wasn't it good of it to rain?" or "who was it, came to see me at three in the afternoon?"

A law-maker, unable to formulate laws, can be a painter, or a land, where, laws when broken, punish, not the offender, but the law-makers, can produce painters. A painter in any other place must struggle to be what he is.