by David Searcy
Down they float into the funnel of the world. For a page and a half, ten frames, descending panoramically into what must be an immense volcanic remnant—glorious, vast Gustave Doré–like walls and buttresses of rock from among whose snowy ledges countless arcing waterfalls tumble and mist into the valley far below. They’re only ducks but they might be angels. It’s that serious. Look what’s happening. You can see it before they do, though you need a loupe. You see that little swirl of something in the middle of the lake that’s in the middle of the green and terraced valley in the middle of all this. That’s where they’re going. That’s the focus. By the bottom of the next page it’s apparent they’re descending into a whirlpool. Well, that’s it, you think. It had to happen. There goes Uncle Scrooge with Donald and Huey and Dewey and Louie along for the ride. No more new issues to go with your bowl of Thompson Seedless grapes and your orange juice when you’re playing sick at home. You’re left with the allegorical necessity, the lesson that desire extends not to but past your longings and that happiness, boys and girls, is an inattentive, accidental sort of thing like a clog in the drain.
I suppose we could have lived with that. But wait. A safety net. They’re jerked right out of the center of this Dantean schematic, this admonitory vision (which is how we’re left to think of it)—“Sprong!”—hauled in like fish and welcomed among the happy, duck-billed, but otherwise human locals, where, for a while, they share the work and the peace of mind. “Until one day” a shiny object is recovered from a rice paddy and all hell breaks loose. The bottle cap, of course. That’s all it takes. Before long, they’ve spotted others capping Scrooge’s remaining bottles and that’s it. They’re after him. Anything for a bottle cap—two hundred pigs, a brick factory. To restore the equilibrium, Scrooge sends Donald over the mountains to arrange for a series of airdrops. For a moment it seems to work as economics takes effect, reducing the bottle cap to something like the German mark of 1923. But it’s too much. The planes keep coming. Donald, parachuting in, beams to announce the rest of the airlift on its way—one plane an hour every day for the next six weeks. They head for the hills. It’s raining bottle caps. The paddies start to choke. The pastures fill. He might as well have never come. It’s just the same. How strange, the shovels and the baskets filled like money buckets. “Don’t you know it’s useless, Uncle Scrooge?” we want to cry although we love it and we know that’s not the point.
It’s me and Bobby Spears and some other kid, a friend of Bobby’s, and we’re armed, after a fashion, and making an incursion into the somewhat hilly, lightly forested, strangely empty realm along the ravine that runs behind the Cotton Bowling Palace, south below some old pink brick apartments and eventually into a park, a sort of park, behind our school, Rusk Junior High. Another year and we’re too old for this. It’s our last chance, in a way, though we don’t think of it like that. We do not think. Last chance for what? I’m not quite sure. We’re armed with two- or two-and-a-half-foot two-by-fours, each fitted out with a pair of heavy rubber bands secured with staples or nails at the front end, then drawn back as far as you dared into the jaws of wooden clothespins wired to the board—new clothespins, preferably, bright of wood and stiff of spring. A flat, round pebble slipped into each rubber band ahead of the clothespin and you’ve got a double-shooter. Put your eye out. Break a window. Send some kid home with his hand up to his head. You didn’t mean it, but you did. The clear and terrible ambivalence of power.
How did we come to agree that this was a good idea? Were other thoughts put forward? No? Apparently not. Okay. So I’ll be here with the weapons in the morning. Saturday morning. Gray and empty. Was the bowling alley open yet? Perhaps. I think it opened pretty early. There were these huge translucent, variously colored hemispheres around it in a zigzag, up and down, so when sequentially illuminated it was like a colorful stream of giant bouncing balls. Of bouncing bowling balls I guess, although that’s not a thing you ever want to see. It was spectacular at night. But in the grayness of the morning, kind of strange. We passed beneath the bouncing balls into a parking lot in the back, past storage structures, then just grass and weeds that sloped down to the ravine, where we spread out the way you do when making an incursion and proceeded to the south, encountering no one. This is history. This is deep, recoverable narrative. Even though we’re only children. Barely children still. We’d managed to arrive at certain actions, certain attitudes relating to a place that made it history. We are breathless. Were a journal left behind, the final words would be “proceeding to the south, encountering no one.”
What has happened here—in the silliest and most literal way—is the capture of a moment. Of a place within the moment. What exhilarates—and I believe we were exhilarated, rubber-band guns all directed down the dark arcade of trees along the stream—was how we found ourselves within this empty space that seemed, by force of arms, “available” (as Nancy says), divested, inexplicably, of all associations; opened up, a gash of unwrapped, unhealed territory bare to these events, to be impressed by them forever. That’s like history, I should think. What makes it different from our ordinary lives. The moment felt—not as event but just as moment—to the point of anguish. Maybe one has heard about such things. Real war, real soldiers come upon a sort of pause, a sort of gap that’s been torn open and there’s nothing they can say or do. Just stand there as if such events had no place else to go, no place to be except the here and now. That’s history, I imagine. What a thing, to come upon it here like this. Slight, smiley, freckled Bobby Spears just up the slope, his nameless friend across the stream, against a tree. They take on sweet and fragile qualities. From where I stand. The cost of immortality, I guess, is this fragility. This sweetness, strangely, like the feeling you get from certain Mathew Brady photographs—as if that bloody ground were never here before this moment, that this moment, which requires a kind of violence to establish or discover, stands for all. It is a matter of intention. We intend to take this ground as we intend to live forever. Always shall have been intending.
At some point we let it go. Fire off our rounds into the shadowy air downstream. These silly weapons are not accurate—your pebble slips off center, shoots off sideways. Half the time, though, it goes sort of where intended, most satisfactorily with a definite spin imparted to the pebble, which recedes with this extraordinary zinging sound as if it had been shot along an actual thread extending from your eye into the distance. We split up and head back home. And then it’s noon and time for lunch. We live forever. Always shall have lived forever.
I am cleaning out the storage space that’s under the stairs but accessed from outside—a steel door somewhat strangely opening onto the grass. Twenty years of stuff diverted here. Not quite tossed out. You never know. I hate to see it in a way, to drag the splitting cardboard boxes into the sun and pull them open—not so much, I think, for the sad associations as the sadness of the things themselves, that sense of deep removal that comes over things as soon, almost as soon, as they leave your hand. The kinds of things that come and go, that seem to circulate right through as if obedient to a metabolic process—here it’s knickknacks, souvenir-type things, all kinds of thoughtless objects, plastic toys, and small stuffed animals. The fundamental stuff that, scattered, say, along the path of a tornado, looks like blood.
And then, oh my, among the scatter, what is here? A little painting in the sunlight. One of my mom’s—an early still life, signed and dated. I have a stack of later efforts; nothing’s ever signed or dated. Flora Searcy 63. Perhaps she liked this one. I like it. Very simple. Much more studious than later ones. On cheap, warped canvas panel. I think maybe I remember it: her painting it, that big white stoneware pitcher, next to which she’s placed a pear and a carnation—d’Anjou pear and red carnation. All around me in the grass there’s all this stuff, tornadic debris or maybe parts of something awaiting reassembly, and I’m standing with this little still-life painting like instructions—how to have such things, regard them in a calm, considered manner. P
itcher, pear, and red carnation. But, of course, it could be anything. Take any of these objects, dust them off, and set them up and paint their picture. From disorder, out of darkness, comes this quiet, measured longing. Things brought close enough to paint are within reach. Within that critical range where they present themselves as things to have, to be desired. You think this sort of thing is mostly just for practice. Things stay put. The light is constant. It will wait for you one Sunday to the next. But it is always more than that. Look how she reaches for the roundness of the bottom of the pitcher like a sightless person. Feeling with her brush the white go gray, then umber. Little arc of white—impasto, gestural, cautiously gestural—where the base splays out to catch the light again. And these things placed against, upon these practically uninflected surfaces. I love that. Nothing interferes—just horizontal bands of different grays to make a table or a ledge. And then behind, an indeterminate dark gray distance. Everything’s a little hazy, glimpsed through gauze. Desire has flattened, saddened, paled. The best my mom could do. But not so bad, I think. The pallid gauziness itself a kind of touching, or longing to be touching; an admission—an unconscious one; it happens on its own—but an admission as to distance, loss, regret, perhaps. A little. Things recede from us. She knows that—always knew it from her childhood. She must know that in this place where things get blown about and tossed away, there’s something in the temporary weight of that carnation. She has caught the gentle crush of it. The frailest object here conveys the weight, conducts the mass and heft of longing—faint, impermanent as fragrance—into the picture.
Did you know that in the thousand years or so between antiquity and the Renaissance there was no still-life painting in the West? Can you imagine? A thousand years. No pictures of nonsubservient things by themselves. Through all that time such things are lost to us as self-sufficient facts. Those things the ancients loved to depict as if to touch, as if to have as they adorned their private houses with mosaics and painted pictures of the sorts of party favors, food, and trinkets given to guests. Look what there is for you, the pictures from Pompeii and Herculaneum seem to say, Look what there is to have, for a while at least, here in this dangerous world. One’s thoughts are poised above these things—the fish, the pomegranates, writing implements, little piles of coins—like one of those coin-operated mechanical claws above the tray of prizes. Yet all that is taken away. Things by themselves fall out of favor. For a thousand years or so those simple objects of experience that happen to appear in sacred pictures (on and on, the sacred pictures) have been cleansed of mundane qualities. Removed from us and placed in higher service. You can’t have them. Can’t even desire them, really. For to do so was a moral and a philosophical error. Mundane objects in themselves had slipped beyond our contemplation. Theologically, philosophically, things by themselves fell into doubt. The particular world was an unintelligible emanation from the mind of God. Things merely in themselves, Saint Augustine tells us (and Aquinas too, though later, more forgiving of the body), are not understood directly. Our minds cannot seize the object, cannot fully know the thing itself. How poor and cold to have it settle out like that, as I suppose it must have done to some extent, into the ordinary life. To have one’s love glance off the object of desire. To lose acquaintance, in some fundamental way, with grapes and lemons and dead rabbits. I remember reading Robin Hood—the Junior Deluxe edition so beautifully written and illustrated by Howard Pyle—and receiving such a powerful and physical impression of medieval life that I carry it with me still. But that’s not it. That can’t be how it really was. So clear, meticulous, and carefully observed. Each tree with roots. Each pie and goblet on each table drawn to reveal itself as just its worldly qualities within the worldly moment:
So the ale was brought and given to Little John. Then, blowing the froth a little away to make room for his lips, he tilted the bottom of the pot higher and higher, till it pointed to the sky, and he had to shut his eyes to keep the dazzle of the sunshine out of them. Then he took the pot away, for there was nothing in it, and heaved a full deep sigh, looking at the others with moist eyes and shaking his head solemnly.
In fact, Little John would never have achieved, in the late twelfth century, where this version places him, quite so bright and deep an understanding of his pot of ale in the sunlight. That would surely have required a firmer grasp of the things at hand, of the actuality of sensible experience, than was available two hundred years or so before the particular world began to spring from under snowy generalities. Little John as here portrayed—brought, as it were, out of the dark—is given a nominalist pot of ale. An anti-Platonic pot of ale whose self-sufficiency reflects his own as he shakes his head not just from the satisfaction of having had his ale but also from his having comprehended it. And that’s really the thing: the comprehension of the sensible world. That it took a thousand years to return to our senses. For the plausible, comprehensible bits of everyday life to begin to poke through here and there like crocuses at last into the wintry holy images. At first a certain pregnant specificity. And then all hell breaks loose. Abundance now becomes depictable with a clearly ravenous accuracy and heedlessness of seasonal propriety. And about this time as well, you start to see, detached from reverential duty, portraits. Independent pictures of us gazing from and out into the ordinary world. And which, in the case of Arcimboldo—those bizarre “composite heads” constructed entirely of game and fruits and various edibles representing, surely, the fullest comprehension of the sensible world—disclose that we can truly be all this and eat it, too. We are profoundly what we eat. What we desire. We love this stuff. And by extension, stuff in general. All the other real and suddenly depictable things. The pots and pans and fancy knobbed Venetian glassware. At some level everything aspires, accedes, to the condition of the edible. As an infant understands. We’re infantile before all this. It’s like we’ve never really seen all this before. Or had forgotten. It becomes a little crazy. Like the repeal of Prohibition. Though constrained to carry certain admonitions—a biblical scene, say, or a statue of Martin Luther in the background.
Here’s a picture by Pieter Aertsen dated 1552. It’s as sublime a picture of meat as you could want. It brings the longing and the guilt into unbearable—somehow lurid, somehow touching—opposition. In the foreground is a jumble of all manner of desirable stuff that would have come to hand and mouth, albeit wealthy hand and mouth, in the sixteenth century. Wonderful stuff. You think, Oh my, that’s what they had. It’s so detailed. You’re so convinced. It’s not just that they had that sort of thing—that sort of pewter flagon, biscuit, money bag, key, lock, pot, pot of flowers. They had these. These ones right here. And hovering over all, they had this joint of meat. This massive, luminous leg of mutton, pork, or whatever glowing softly at the center of the painting in a golden light that feels like afternoon. You glimpse the apology, the guilt, way in the background. Through a portal you can see, rather stiffly and sketchily rendered, a scene from the Gospel of Luke: Christ in the house of Mary and Martha. It’s overwhelmed by the joint of meat, which seems to pose before it as before some nineteenth-century photographer’s decorative screen—very much, in fact, like one of those ample Victorian nudes on a naughty postcard displaying herself in front of some bit of classical scenery to exonerate somewhat the prurient gaze.
Then by the century’s end, it’s just too much—all this confronted guilt and longing. It collapses into the first pure still-life paintings since antiquity—the admonition now implicit in the wilting leaf, the wormhole in the apple. Most spectacularly, though, in the still-life pictures of Juan Sánchez Cotán, it clarifies into the purest possible terms. It’s one of those moments when the first glimpse of a thing, of an idea, remains the best. The guilt goes black. Imponderable dark, imponderable space in front of which our desire, ungoverned, undiffused by homely context, goes straight at, attaches to, becomes almost a property of the simple vegetables, fruits, and game birds placed or suspended, Joseph Cornell–like, within the perfec
tly squared and smooth and, one imagines, cold stone window. And they’re all like this. These simple still-life paintings. They are all this cold stone window—opening onto empty space or the uninflected dark of the previous thousand years or original sin or that regret I sense in my mother’s little painting vastly concentrated, purified to black—in which, in brilliant raking light, we see the things we love, the exact particular things we love exactly, perfectly, self-sufficiently painted and arranged against the abyss as if to say, All right, you can have these things but you have to come to the window.
And that light, the raking light, somehow surprises. Like a door has been opened somewhere accidentally. Oh, we’re sorry. We thought this was the door to sumptuous floral arrangements, table settings, stuff like that—not this control room or whatever it is. Prop storage. Not the place where our desire is kept forever in its blazing perishability in the dark.
There aren’t that many. Only one dated—1602. And probably all about that time. In 1603 Sánchez Cotán took holy orders. So would I, I have to think. Having summed it up as best I could. With nothing more to say about it. That might seem like a pretty good plan. Or maybe simply pack it up with little notes on the cardboard boxes. Shove it all back into the dark. Except the painting, I suppose. Hang on to that. But shove the rest back into the dark where it belongs.
