face of something beautiful.
His words have made her mind shut down, like one of those metal shutters storekeepers pull down here at closing time. She remembers that he always had that potential; sometimes when he talked to her about music, she couldn’t listen. His attention to the formal details leached the pleasure for her. She calls up an old resentment: he had stolen music from her. She had loved to sing; their first encounter was about her singing. But after she took up with him, she didn’t sing again. Believing anything she could do with music would be, compared with what he did, inferior and false. So now she wants to pull him down from the false heights of his aesthetic pedestal.
She moves closer to the statue of Moses. “Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz ,” she says. “And why the horns? They make him somehow more lovable or approachable than Moses usually seems.”
“I suppose if you look at it like that, it’s amusing.”
“But you don’t want to be amused.”
“No, it disturbs me. I think it’s a mess. Some historians say the statue’s a mess because the funds were cut at the last minute, or because the sculptor was rushed. That it wasn’t his fault. But I think it was his fault, because he allowed something to be presented that should not have been presented. People said he was trying to be Michelangelo, which he had no right even to consider, because he was nothing but a hack. The statue became a laughingstock. He killed himself from shame.”
“What a terrible thing,” Miranda says. “It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it less terrible. You want to grab him by the shoulders and say, ‘It’s not worth your life.’ ”
“What is, then, worth a life?”
“Nothing.”
“I won’t accept that. Then we’re only animals, living to survive.”
“I can see giving up your own life to save the life of another person, certainly your own child. But for a statue, an unliving thing. No.”
“I’m not sure. Isn’t it possible to no longer want to live because your work is a failure? If you’ve lived for your work, which is not, I think, the worst thing to live for. In our fantasies about the artist’s life we never include the reality that most art that is made is a failure. We believe that it’s important to leave a mark, but it doesn’t occur to us that it might be a bad mark, undistinguished or corrupt, a mark that would be better unleft. There’s no need even for mediocre art, to say nothing of bad art. Whereas in your field to be adequate is OK; it’s better to do an adequate job than to leave the job completely undone.”
“You know nothing about what I do,” she says, wondering when he became so rigid, so punitive. Should she take the time to educate him, or allow this to be one more thing she holds against him, one more grievance she can keep, like a stone inside her shoe.
“Mediocre work of the kind I do, of the kind people like me do, could lead to sickness and death. Real death, not just an unfortunate aesthetic moment. Nevertheless, I repeat what I said: a failure of proportion in stone is not something that should lead to death.”
She knows he hasn’t heard her. Or has chosen not to. Because she understands that he’s not really talking about the statue of Moses, about Michelangelo and the Renaissance popes and the suicidal sculptor. He’s talking about himself. He’s describing his life out loud. He wants her to know something: that he has given something up. But does he want her to know it, or does he want to know it himself? She doesn’t know whom his words are meant for. But she understands the sorrow behind the words, and like the sharp rattle of the lifting shutters, indicating morning on the Roman streets, some signal has been heard. Something has lifted in her, something has opened up.
“But what is it,” he says, to her, to someone else, she thinks, to no one, “this impulse to make a mark?”
He wants her to talk
His words have made her mind shut down, like one of those metal shutters storekeepers pull down here at closing time. She remembers that he always had that potential; sometimes when he talked to her about music, she couldn’t listen. His attention to the formal details leached the pleasure for her. She calls up an old resentment: he had stolen music from her. She had loved to sing; their first encounter was about her singing. But after she took up with him, she didn’t sing again. Believing anything she could do with music would be, compared with what he did, inferior and false. So now she wants to pull him down from the false heights of his aesthetic pedestal.
She moves closer to the statue of Moses. “Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz ,” she says. “And why the horns? They make him somehow more lovable or approachable than Moses usually seems.”
“I suppose if you look at it like that, it’s amusing.”
“But you don’t want to be amused.”
“No, it disturbs me. I think it’s a mess. Some historians say the statue’s a mess because the funds were cut at the last minute, or because the sculptor was rushed. That it wasn’t his fault. But I think it was his fault, because he allowed something to be presented that should not have been presented. People said he was trying to be Michelangelo, which he had no right even to consider, because he was nothing but a hack. The statue became a laughingstock. He killed himself from shame.”
“What a terrible thing,” Miranda says. “It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it less terrible. You want to grab him by the shoulders and say, ‘It’s not worth your life.’ ”
“What is, then, worth a life?”
“Nothing.”
“I won’t accept that. Then we’re only animals, living to survive.”
“I can see giving up your own life to save the life of another person, certainly your own child. But for a statue, an unliving thing. No.”
“I’m not sure. Isn’t it possible to no longer want to live because your work is a failure? If you’ve lived for your work, which is not, I think, the worst thing to live for. In our fantasies about the artist’s life we never include the reality that most art that is made is a failure. We believe that it’s important to leave a mark, but it doesn’t occur to us that it might be a bad mark, undistinguished or corrupt, a mark that would be better unleft. There’s no need even for mediocre art, to say nothing of bad art. Whereas in your field to be adequate is OK; it’s better to do an adequate job than to leave the job completely undone.”
“You know nothing about what I do,” she says, wondering when he became so rigid, so punitive. Should she take the time to educate him, or allow this to be one more thing she holds against him, one more grievance she can keep, like a stone inside her shoe.
“Mediocre work of the kind I do, of the kind people like me do, could lead to sickness and death. Real death, not just an unfortunate aesthetic moment. Nevertheless, I repeat what I said: a failure of proportion in stone is not something that should lead to death.”
She knows he hasn’t heard her. Or has chosen not to. Because she understands that he’s not really talking about the statue of Moses, about Michelangelo and the Renaissance popes and the suicidal sculptor. He’s talking about himself. He’s describing his life out loud. He wants her to know something: that he has given something up. But does he want her to know it, or does he want to know it himself? She doesn’t know whom his words are meant for. But she understands the sorrow behind the words, and like the sharp rattle of the lifting shutters, indicating morning on the Roman streets, some signal has been heard. Something has lifted in her, something has opened up.
“But what is it,” he says, to her, to someone else, she thinks, to no one, “this impulse to make a mark?”
He wants her to talk
Similar Books
