& so Cairey’s first of many run-ins with the institutionalized systems of rehabilitation & mental health unfolded. He never quite recovered from the scene of his parents flipping through the collected evidence accrued against their son- their son, the pornographer & creep, who they had never imagined lurking behind the locked door of his bedroom, day to day, producing perversions as his peers played sports & did volunteer work at senior citizen homes (they imagined). He was taken to therapy for the first time, & diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, provided a prescription for miniature doses of methamphetamines, & was scheduled for regular appointments. After this, a new contract was made in the Turnbull household, as a means of correcting Cairey’s warped socialization. It required his participation in after-school clubs every day of the week, aside from the day he went to therapy. What these clubs were, they did not care, but as Mrs. Turnbull proffered in one of the stoical gnomicisms she’d grown to love: “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings.”
Thus Carey entered into the carnival of the social world & learned to cope with its juggling routines. He joined whatever clubs he could find that were tangentially related to his artistic ambitions. He was, by the time he left high school, responsible for a weekly cartoon in the student newspaper (which could be found in nearly every trash of the school). He made graphic designs for student council campaigns, as well as marginal embellishments in the yearbook. He was, otherwise, a frequent guest at the meetings of various interest groups, but mostly, he could be found at the meetings of what was called the “Anime Club”- which was much less a refuge for aficionados of japanese animation & cartooning, than it was segregated safe space for a particular caste of untouchables.
His work for all of these groups took much of his will & effort to accomplish, on top of maintaining his mixed averages in his academic subjects, but somehow he found time to fill his notebooks, on the bus for instance, or during lunch. & still he managed to find time to make money on the side, on commission, & still, these commissions were mostly pornographic in nature. Such drawings, catering to the most intimate of desires, were in high demand amongst that tribe horny alienated nerds who attended the “Anime Club.” Cairey was considered one of them by most on the outside- one of those who were to be justly sneered down upon by the stalwart & chosen elect, the future politicians, business executives, lawyers, doctors, & technocrats who attended debating clubs, mock trials, model governments- they who had received the mystery rites that accompanied their inductions into honor societies & varsity teams which enabled them to recognize the damned & reprobate when they saw them, sliming about their halls with their affected strangeness, their stained & awkward fashions, speaking their gawky expressive vernaculars...
Cairey kept a foot in their world, as a fellow traveler of sorts, but he was not considered a citizen by its inhabitants. His tastes were strange to them, even, as he preferred comic books to anime- & he preferred swords & sorcery, dragons, & knights, & princesses, all of the old environments of fantasy- to the more science-fictional & contemporary obsessions of his compatriots. They did not have much in common aside from their alienation & mutual appreciation of alien cultures.
Cairey treated all of his commitments & routines the same way- as necessary impingements on his solitude & his personal struggle with the crucible of art in which he failed, time & again, to produce a nonpornographic artwork which could satisfy himself & a crowd. This was his primary concern in life, & it was this that lead him, eventually, to believe that he could learn a method for doing such a thing, from an institution devoted to such things, as so many of his peers assumed the same with regard to their own ambitions & vocations.
& it was thus that Cairey set his heart on two goals- to move to the city, where there were jobs for artists he was told, & to attend an art school, to receive training in art production which would enable him to be employed as an artist. Both of these were satisfied by his choice of the General Arts Youniversity, which had been one of his few options, considering his middling statistical significance when measured by the metrics that served as the criteria for making such decisions. His art portfolio was, admittedly, nothing special compared to so many other portfolios of similarly amateurish anime-inspired drawings with their cat’s eyes, their inhuman proportions, their overly-expressive faces, their romantic themes, & their lack of thematic variety...
& thus did Carey face, not for the first or the last time, the collective computations which governed his socio-economic fate. He learned quite a bit more about this in his youniversity courses. It threw him for a loop, as he had always believed, or perhaps, imagined, that the art world was a refuge from such worldly concerns. He came to realize that it was governed, just as well, by the completely arbitrary tyrannies of the rest of the real world which he had always dreamed of escaping.
He learned about the propaganda embedded in every work of art. He learned about the bondage of the commodity form, the technological & economic superstructures which dictated its collective will, deploying artists as its shock troops. He learned about the violent nature of the artistic eye, the histories of bigoted depictions, the biases of representation, & all about every sort of worldly corruption imaginable. However, despite spending six years shifting majors, he never learned anything about producing an artwork of undeniable quality & genius. Rather, he had learned that this idea of “undeniably great art” & “artistic genius” were entirely contingent, relative, & frankly, anachronistic & delusional in the current age. He learned that supposing such things could exist, or ever existed, their superlative qualities were only recognized for their utility or else the quality of their ideas, meaning, their advocation for a particularly noble societal end. In fact, he learned that this alone was what was worth pursuing in art, as in life, & that artists were no different from any other worker or human being in this respect. He realized, ultimately, that he produced things like all other producers of things, & in his time, these things they produced were quite often not things at all, but virtual representations of things.
These lessons sank in as well as all his other lessons did, which is to say, he knew enough of them to sail by on a C average. Where he ran into trouble was in his peer-reviewed workshops- as while others produced objects which induced consideration on other subjects- such as, the political & ethical legacies of events & figures from previous decades & centuries, or the implications inherent in the categorization of a piece of art as a “plagiarization”- Carey’s works induced only cringes, laughter, indifference & confusion over “what it says.” Sometimes he received outright condemnation over a particular quirk in his depiction which was taken as a direct personal offense spawned from a hatred he had disguised.
For instance, his attempt to lithograph a horrific & grotesque satyr, wearing a black crown, lording over a cannibal feast, was met with individual disgust & a few partizans debating over the potential heroism or villainy of the depiction of its central figure. Some recognized it as a caricature of the conception of evil found in depictions of the subordinated quote-unquote primitive Other, while others recognized it as a triumph of the marginalized against the dictates of the normalized colonialist & bourgeois majority, as the satyr was quote-unquote primitive & quote-unquote unrefined in his vitalistic nudity (the lynchpin in this case being the fact that one of the corpses on the table wore chinos, dress shoes, & a watch). None of them recognized that this was Tinfasel.
The only question he would ask at the end of his criticisms was the one he’d always asked when peddling his goods- would they purchase the piece, & if so, how much would they pay for it. Sometimes a person would say yes to the first question, but none of them would ever set a price. Cairey presumed, naturally, that this meant his work was a failure. All of his works in his youniversity days were failures.
These sessions always baffled Cairey as he left them less sure of the quality of his work, & of his mind than when he’d entered. It seemed customary for even the most brutal of critical accusations to include
a preamble regarding the speaker’s subjective enjoyment of some element within the artwork, but the elements they chose seemed entirely trivial to Cairey. “Good job with the grass” was one that stuck with him, as he’d nearly scribbled it on to fill negative space a few minutes before class. He found no correlation whatsoever between the efforts he put forth & the receptions he received. He had even conducted experiments to this end- & found that a doodle could receive more praise for its “expressive minimalism” than his most trying attempts to create “True Art.” & still, no one ever offered to buy his work from him.
He was convinced that this was a result of his own inadequacy- as he still, even then, believed that if he truly accomplished his goal of creating a work of “True Art,” that it would be recognized, ipso facto, for its undeniable greatness, & consequently, it would provide him a substantial sum of money which would enable him to live somewhere nice, a place he always imagined as that house on the lake. For his attempts to succeed, he had been persuaded, he would require an undeniably great theme or idea- something beyond all that he had made before, his various imitations & regurgitations of his private obsessions or the satisfactions of the intimate desires of others. & it was in this spirit that he’d sought out drugs, stimulants, delirients, hallucinogens, & narcotics of every variety available, as these had been attested by his peers, since high school, to be the source of their creative insights & revelations. Under the influence of these substances, Cairey felt that he’d struck the vein of such themes & ideas, & imagined, always, the resolution of the Princess, the Knight, & the Satyr- but he struggled with translating his private revelations into his craft. Even when he considered himself successful, no one else did.
It was in this pursuit of revelation that Cairey’d procured the amanita muscaria, on that occasion of the worst drug-induced trip of his life, which had convinced him, quite viscerally, of the infernal consequences of his quest to produce such a work of “True Art.” It had sent him into a destructive fit, spawned by the terror of his looming failure. He tore the library of notebooks he’d curated over all his years of production to shreds, liberating them from the boxes he’d kept them in, under his bed, only to nullify them in their entirety. He covered his bedroom with a confetti composed of his scrapped compositions, as some sort of apology to the fearful god who punished him for his insolence. In the ensuing panic over his self-destruction, as he came down & sobered up from his mystical intoxication, he felt the dawning of the one truly great theme- a scene that united all his earlier abortive attempts at “True Art.”
The project he envisioned was monumental in scope. He would use all of these scraps surrounding him as the bedrock of his composition. He set to work amassing them in piles, elated & enthused with the theme he had struck upon- a perfect recreation of a scene from his most beautiful dream. It was only when he started producing the piece that he’d realize its impossibility.
What he’d envisioned was a complete panorama, which would surround the viewer of his work on all sides as they scanned it from the canoe he would place in its center. It would be from this perspective that the illusion of immersion in his dream would be as complete as he could feasibly fashion given his limited means & talents. He made a rough schematic for the panorama, & decided to break the scene into pieces, & work on it one quarter-arc at a time, as the complete three-hundred & sixty degrees required for the complete cycloramic canvas, at forty feet by three-hundred & sixty feet, would be a lifetime’s work, he imagined. So he planned its first installment, a forty by ninety foot canvas, but realized that even this was beyond his immediate time-restraints. So he divided this into two forty by forty-five foot canvases, & set out creating the first.
He used the scraps of his juvenalia as a rough paper-mache scaffolding to express the variations & textures of the environment. He spent two weeks laying just this foundation on the first canvas, which was merely the first half of his first of four consecutive projects. With only two weeks remaining before his freshman year’s end & his first final student exhibition, he decided he could only, possibly, finish just this one canvas, & only if he was lucky & diligent.
He used every method he’d taught himself over the years as he spent days upon days skipping class to keep working in his studio space, even sleeping on the floor beside his project. His greatest struggle was mixing the perfect diversity of blue pigments, as in his memory of his dream, floating in the midst of a midnight mist, lost on Lake Lear, everything was soaked in various blues- from the thunderous blue of lightning in the scattered clouds, to the luminescent blue of the moon, to the blue-tinged scatterings of moonlight in the plenitude of wind raised ripples across the surface of the water.
In this first panel, from top to bottom, the composition was planned as follows: the full moon, wholly contained, & below it, the approaching thunderclouds, & then the suggestion of the distant shore obscured through the mist, & then the encroaching fog, & then the ring of water surrounding the canoe. He set to work on it in this order, & on the day before his presentation, he’d only made it to the fog- giving him, roughly, two-thirds of a complete canvas- just over twenty five feet by forty five feet, while a crude, unpainted, fifteen feet by forty-five feet emptiness, filled only with paper mache, pencil outlines, & accidental splatters, composed its bottom third.
This failure disheartened him enough to abandon the absurd scope of his impossible idea, & so he decided to fill this emptiness with a thick & uniform coat of dark, nearly indigo, blue. & after doing this, he felt less pleased with the result than he felt relieved that it was over. He’d never considered how much had to go into an artwork of such scale, such as the one he’d imagined possible. He was certain that it if he had completed it, it would have amazed an audience from its sheer audacity & scope- but he was beginning to suspect that this admiration would only be the subconscious communication, to his audience, of the time & effort it had taken to produce it. He believed that they’d only admire it as much as they’d admire his struggle, the way anyone respects any feat of endurance, no matter its end, with the notion that “I couldn’t do that.” Worse, he was not sure anyone would buy such a large painting, even if they admired his struggle.
Anyway, he was sure that he was incapable of completing it. No- he realized in his days of toiling how senseless the prospect was. What would he have done next if he had really spent the years he’d need to complete it? What would have been done with it? He wondered. At best it would rot in some museum, or worse, in some storage unit addended to a museum. What would his artwork have changed or inspired in the world? Nothing, he thought, it was not innovative or revolutionary, & its theme was a solipsistic conceit, emerging, probably, from his childhood trauma compensating for itself in narcissistic self-display. This is what his therapist had suggested, anyway, when he had told him about his struggles with completing it. He felt some truth in this summation.
When he presented it, he received the same sort of confusing comments he’d received with all of his works. One person even suggested that the bottom third was superior to the top two-thirds. & still, no one suggested that it was worth any money or wallspace, never mind their own.
Perhaps there’s nothing wrong, Cairey thought, with not being an artist, or rather, with being a “creative worker” under the helm of a greater artistic visionary. “Beauty rests in utility” as his mother was wont to say. Perhaps, he thought, he should at least make things that people would pay him for if he could not complete a masterpiece of his own. This was what convinced him to change his major, once more, from Aesthetic Praxis & Explication to Fundamentals of Lighting & Texture, with minor studies in Narrative Architecture, Immersive Entertainment, & Simulation.
Here he learned more marketable skills, though he tended to fare poorly in the classes that extended beyond the “Fundamentals of Lighting & Texture” (which was why he’d ended up majoring in it). He figured that this would be the role he would play in the artworld, & he tried to learn to enjoy it. Often, he found that he
did enjoy it, & he began to feel optimistic for the first time since the great disillusionment of his freshman year mushroom trip. With this new attitude, he left the youniversity & entered the working world. He freelanced for various corporations & enterprises, as a sort of temporary worker, fixing up, & tidying assets that others had produced. His panoramic dream was forgotten, & he was only reminded of it, years later, on the most inauspicious day of his life.
In his memory, the years that followed his delayed graduation are chronologically inexplicable- as they resemble a treadmill run through scrolling backgrounds- apartments with half-year leases & jobs that lasted months at most, rendered him an ascetic nomad & scrapper, weighed down by a debt with interest payments that were barely within his penny-pinching grasp. He lived in a state of perpetual fiscal anxiety, & he was wearied over the tenuous nature of his circumstances. He assuaged his anxieties with biweekly drug binges, with alcohol, & with simulated sex. These provided momentary escapes, but ultimately left him with another anxiety, exacerbated by a sense of guilt & shame, for the monetary cost of his consumption, which could never assuage itself without, of course, more money.
He imagined scenarios- absurd deals proffered by the demons of his commercial imagination. He imagined lopping off a limb for money, or selling his blood, or his inessential organs. He contemplated winning the lottery, robbing a bank, coming upon windfall fortunes from the deaths of unknown relatives. He envisioned himself getting rich off of criminal enterprises, selling drugs, producing counterfeit documents- but no such offers or opportunities fell into his lap. Rather, he walked dogs, posted fliers for political candidates, collected signatures for various non-profits, & when he was lucky, worked freelance in the dingiest corners of the art world.
Selfie, Suicide Page 10
