Portrait of Artist in Early December
by Paul Hina
It was me he was to meet that
day. We had left each other in the morning with plans to meet for lunch later
in the afternoon.
He didn't show.
None of us ever heard from him again.
I am a little surprised to see that they haven't taken it down. It even
seems to have been recently dusted, as recently as today. The frame is clean,
all except for the dust that was wiped to the ends of each corner. It has been
hanging in the same place for as long as I can remember.
We will all have our private minutes in here tonight. We will all pass this room
on our way to the washroom, see the light that shines down exclusively on the
picture. We will all see it and sneak inside to pay our respects, get lost in
the reverie.
The past I knew with him left a place in my belly that, even today, ignites into
life when he returns. Those old places will reawaken an old richness, a long ago
promise, and I will have to curse my present self for not living up to his idealism.
I will leave that room tonight feeling old, and knowing that I will have to face
myself in the mirror of the washroom, I will skip it altogether, return downstairs
and pretend that I am not too old to change.
I will fail.
We will reinvent our old personalities. Yesterday’s philosophies will incite
nervous laughter and eventually collide into the stutters of shame. Our clothes
will become quite uncomfortable in their formal absurdity, and someone will inevitably
bring up his name.
He will be all around us.
However, not one of us has seen him since the morning I left him, still standing
in front of that window in his tiny studio apartment.
A cup of coffee in his hand.
That angelic imperfect smile strewn wrecklessly, happily, across his face.
The city awakening, alighting exclusively its brilliant light against his faulted
form.
I wish he could've been less tranquil. Perhaps if he were angry, or even
sleeping, I wouldn't miss him so much.
He was obsessed with his own face. It was not an issue that he tried to hide,
not a desire he didn't readily take advantage of at every opportunity. But
he was not vain. I guess, perhaps, depending on who you talk to, some that knew
him might think that his whole image was rehearsed, prepared material he had combed
over in his head before parties. This was only because his conversation was so
flowing, so flawless. He may have kept silent during entire discussions, and you
would think that he had been silenced until later when he would mutter some revelation
that made the earler discussion seem trite, or small.
The people that visited with him, or were lucky enough to have him visit them,
might extol his genius, even while agreeing that his antics could be infuriating,
rehearsed or not. He could not be approached for questions regarding his character.
To question his character was always an invitation to reflect upon your own. He
really was like a mirror that way. He made you a smarter person in his reflection.
He was never a man to be taken without seriousness. He would give you laughter,
sometimes being downright absurd, and yet he could make you feel like you should
leave a room for not properly thinking about what you had just said. He would
surely deny this ability. He was constantly being humbled by the idiocy that he
feared he carried him. I truly believe that he never quite understood how enormous
he was. We all tried to hide it from him. We had egos of our own we were contending
with. But he was the one. We all knew that he was the magician. He could make
you believe anything, and yet he was so genuine in his goodness, that you loved
being near him. Because he made you believe you were good. He made you believe
you were important, even when you knew you weren't. He made you believe
you could do anything, and he did not doubt his own ability to do anything.
He could have done anything, and done it better than anyone else. Even if he couldn't
do it better than anybody else, he would have you convinced that no one else was
even close.
He chose to create. What he chose to create is a matter for discussion. However,
it is not a discussion anyone in this house is prepared to bring up, not tonight
anyway. Some of us might never say that we have the gifts that he had. We know
when we see that picture that we are less a person than he expected us to be.
We don't have his drive. It is within the frame of that picture that we
find ourselves asking ourselves how it is we gave up so soon on trying to believe
in something more, something greater.
It is strange, too, because I would desire no other company, and the same goes
for everybody who has truly listened to his face, which he was constantly aware
of, hearing him build a new world above us.
He might say that his mind is broken, that he has spent too much time in a box
full of noise. He might say that he was poor, with a restless home. He might say
that he was kicked a lot, dirty. He might say that he is a genius, but no one
would say he hadn't worked for it.
He never finished anything, and I'm sure that it is because he had beaten
all things, mastered them too quickly and his interest waned.
Other peoples' standards for time did not apply to a man that grew from
a machine where pictures talked a talk that wasn't rehearsed. His mind was
nothing if not like a machine, a machine he constantly trusted to run without
fault. He knew what he said was true when he said it, because his mind believed
it, and his mind believed it to be right.
He was not perfect, and I don't mean to give the impression that anyone,
including him, believed that he was. His mind might have been a fine piece of
crafted work, but his eyes were nothing but human. Two dark riddles that opened
up and swallowed you if you got too close, and he would rarely let you, though
you would often try.
He was hardly someone to be loved. He had little patience for the everyday routine
of a practical person. To love him would be to invite yourself to a demure existence,
and still no one failed to love him. They all wanted to love him, but he chased
us all away by having a predetermined love affair with each of us, deeming it
unsuitable, finished the exercise, and never gave as much as a single solitary
word of adornment.
This man, who all of us adored, was not a man to be had. You had him when he let
you, and you lost him when he decided to be lost.
He wakes up in the middle of the night. He wonders what his body might look like
in the little light that dribbles in from the window. He approaches the window,
naked. It is Christmastime, and as he draws the curtains away from the window,
a little cold catches him in just the right way, making him smile. A few chasing
colored lights from somewhere on the street below him shine across his chest.
He is a marvel.
His body isn't nearly perfect. He is far too thin. I had rarely seen him
eat, and he had little tolerance for those of us who ate regularly, on a schedule.
It was much the same with his habits concerning sleep. I know he slept, but he
had more energy, and existed in more minutes during a day than were available
for someone to exist on proper rest.
His body is not so thin that it is not sleek. It is sleek. It is fit. It is a
fitness that fills and wanes. His was a thinness something like the moon.
The moon is alive out the window. He admires the shapes inside it. He makes shapes,
denies others, paints pictures on the surface, and waxes silently poetic about
past lovers.
A young woman props herself up on one elbow from a bed at the rear side of the
room he is standing in. Some nights she forgets how important he is to the world
out that window, but tonight she sees that the world does not take him for granted,
and he appreciates its splendor. And when he leaves the world it will not be ready.
He will have beaten it before it was ready to let him go. He will be gone, and
the world will still be shining lights on him.
I took his picture that night. He acted as if he didn't notice, but he did.
He always noticed when someone was looking at him.
There was a moment of silence at dinner tonight. I thought about mentioning his
name. I thought about telling them where I think he is tonight, but we all have
our own pictures of where he is, who he has become. I am sure that, like that
photograph of him standing at that window in early December, he is painting pictures
on the moon.
I guess that is my one comfort, that his light keeps me from being alone. His
light keeps us all young. He will always be a young artist in a world that knows
no art without youth.
And we miss him.
Cathedral
Lake by Paul
Hina is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.