but the ear is up, awake, at work,
to guide a dreamer’s outstretched hand,
to reach and not to fall, to feel the lichened stones
are named with names of sailors, to measure lichen’s
perfect crawl, the protracted troth
of alga and fungus,
slow and glowing as ever.
And you who are arrived at
just as slowly, what provisions have you brought
for dreaming, what’s to be rationed
in the dark, in what economy of strokes and stars?
As mica means crumb, and galaxy, milk. As every cell aspires
to the whole of the memory. A ferry comes back
without a name. A fall crossing, a summer one.
Sometimes a spring light
bare as eggs
would spread on the Atlantic.
And Orient Point
comes back. And direction, like a rake,
rakes the pebbles backward from the shore,
each radiant gray and pink a minor piece
of the dragging glass of waves.
The sequence of romance is like this, a daylight series
of unduplicated exchange. A scarf-red item
dragged through dream. Or every
shedding yellow ever hanging at the prow.
Maybe there are breaks in the series. Things we coveted
above the rest.
Because a wooden boat held gleaming fish
in flowering lantern. Because this is a feeling
that might be loved to distraction.
Say that light was there
to give away. To be put out. As kinglet, gannet,
swallow and grebe, as petrel and pelican
give a skimming weight
to water’s mapless dreaming.
As spring is part of dreams and part of winter.
As she makes the day world cold, as she keeps its granite
crashed upon, and pocked, as spring has made her living
in a welling stream, in shell and clay,
brass and wood, in brass and wood and skin
and wind, icy and free, a discipline
tacked to light,
the curious mirror, in sharing and undoing, in marking
her momentum with retreat. As a handspan
has measured a horse. As outspread arms
compose a fathom. The river bottom
seen is also leaf meal.
Not dark, but dormant gold, a torch
on the stone
of a narrow stairwell. Lake or river, body or body,
the instruments are only sylvan.
As first snow falls,
as the red-naped flicker chisels firs.
Hades fills his well with naked light.
Luminescence is the adaptation
for kissing
the sun goodbye. There’s an old dog
in that dark, a frilled shark, a living fossil
in the depths of earthbound water.
For what is lower
than engraved, who is for these regions of the dream
soul alone will find compatible—black tracts
of magnetic spherules, frangible grains
of ravishing stars, loosest
aims of clayey matter, finest bits of cooled volcanic rock,
once ledged, once sifted down, oxides of iron
and manganese, earth in total catalog without
sufficient light to read.
Psi, Phi, Omega
James Morrow
My favorite bodily organs come in pairs. Lungs for toking, ears for jazz, testicles for thinking, eyes for earning a living. During the past fifty years I’ve been well paid to paint the icons of fantastika—vampires, zombies, aliens, spaceships, haunted castles—at the behest of the New York book-publishing industry, each image intended to make potential readers eager for what lies beyond the front cover. Believe it or not, I lavish as much passion on these commercial efforts as on my paintings that end up in prominent museums (modesty forbids) and renowned private collections (humility prohibits). Art is where you find it, whether hanging in a temperature-controlled gallery or shelved in a supermarket bookrack across from the frozen peas.
Shortly after my forty-fourth birthday, I received the strangest commission of my career. “My employer requires a large, oblong painting,” said the intruder upon barging into my Chelsea studio and interrupting my labors on a cover for Carrie Porfiry’s latest Scarlet Dragon novel. “The content is simple, so you should have no trouble completing it by noon next Monday—though I must tell you my employer cannot grant you even one additional hour.”
I scowled at my visitor, then contemplated my red, benevolent dragon, its scales flashing like terra-cotta roof tiles after a sun-shower. With a Sharpie pen I wrote “Leonard Moncaster” in the lower lefthand corner. The designer at Doubleday, who hated me, would probably crop out my signature, but occasionally my vanity slipped past him.
“In fact, the painting will have no manifest content at all.” The woman approached my easel and surveyed the acrylic dragon. “White oil on white primer, top to bottom, edge to edge.”
“They do abstract expressionism down the street,” I said. “Please go away.”
“She will pay you thirty thousand dollars.”
“For how large a piece?”
“Wall to wall, floor to ceiling.”
“And your employer is … ?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Can you tell me your name?”
“Olivia Guzetti.” She was tall, regal, and strikingly beautiful, with high cheekbones and an erotic overbite. I could easily imagine her essaying the lead role in Dracula’s Daughter, the hit Broadway musical running at the Neil Simon. “You’ll have to clear away all that bric-a-brac.” She gestured toward the far wall, its fractured plaster obscured by easels, stretcher bars, rolled canvas, and aluminum shelves filled with brushes and linseed oil. “I suggest you hire an assistant from the New York Academy.”
“Why the strict deadline?”
“Because the twenty-first of August 2017 will bring a total eclipse of the sun.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Did you play hooky on the day Mister Peepers explained eclipses?”
“I mean I don’t understand about the deadline.”
“You don’t need to understand.”
Olivia set her distressed-leather shoulder bag on my worktable, then drew out three mason jars, each filled with a white, dry powder.
“Are you paying me in cocaine?” I asked.
“My employer tells me this is very old pigment, concocted by none other than Sir Isaac Newton following a formula by the alchemist Paracelsus.”
“Do you expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t believe it myself. She bought this powder at a Sotheby’s auction along with some of Newton’s other personal effects. Mixed with linseed oil, it should prove sufficient for covering the entire canvas.”
“Alchemical linseed oil or just linseed oil?”
Saying nothing, the intruder handed over a Citibank check made out to me in the amount of $15,000. The account bore Ms. Guzetti’s name and a New Haven street address, so I learned nothing further about my patron—unless, of course, that person was Olivia.
“You’ll receive the second fifteen thousand when the job is complete. My employer will take possession of the canvas in person. One final detail. Before she arrives, you must board up your skylight. The middle plank should include an iris diaphragm with an aperture range of zero to five millimeters, so a single sunbeam can enter the room and continue traveling at 186,282 miles per second.”
“So I’m to turn my studio into a camera obscura?”
“A temporary inconvenience. As soon as the experiment ends, you can tear down the shutters.”
“What’s supposed to happen when the sunbeam hits the canvas?”
“It won’t hit the canvas—
not directly. My employer will use an intervening prism, a rare antique, probably one of a kind.”
“From the Newton lot at Sotheby’s?” I asked, and Olivia nodded. “Did it also include a bottle of Isaac Newton–brand alchemical primer?”
“Use Liquitex or whatever sort of gesso you prefer.”
“Newton was one of my ex-wife’s great heroes.”
“Indisputably a genius, though also something of a loon.” Olivia restored the bag to her shoulder. “Universal gravitation aside, he spent many hours pursuing scriptural bibliomancy and crackpot theology.” She strode out of the studio. “Noon on Monday—not one minute later.”
Following up on Olivia’s suggestion, I hired a New York Academy of Art student, one Cyril Hunt, a handsome young African American with an edgy portfolio. His speciality was surreal oils dramatizing the delusions of autocrats, plutocrats, and white people. Strangely enough, while he appreciated my gallery paintings and had even attended my last opening, what most impressed him was my proximity to the universe of speculative literature. He read the stuff voraciously. In his own words, “Without Octavia Butler, Thomas Pynchon, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel R. Delany, life would be a mistake.”
Naturally Cyril assumed that anyone commissioning a ten-by-twenty-foot blank canvas was having fun at my expense—an opinion he promoted even after I noted that, so far at least, my nameless patron was the person racking up the expenses.
“It’s all been done before,” he said. “In that play by Yasmina Reza.”
“Was that the one about … ?”
“The three middle-aged friends and their middle-class neuroses and a crisis involving a white painting by a famous artist. One of the men buys the painting for two hundred thousand francs, which drives the second friend bugfuck—”
“And meanwhile the third friend tries to keep them from coming to blows. I identified with all three characters.”
“I identified with the painting,” said Cyril. “Science fictionally, I mean. Alternative, realitywise.”
We soon agreed that, while our task was ostensibly simple, meeting the deadline was not a sure thing. The week passed in a blur of activity—buying a carpet-size roll of canvas, bolting oaken beams together to form an immense set of stretcher bars, nailing the epic cloth to the bars, wetting the reverse side to further tighten the canvas, applying two coats of gesso to the obverse. I had no trouble turning the ancient pigment into oil for a modern painting, a fact suggesting Ms. Guzetti might be lying about its seventeenth-century provenance. When I explained to Cyril that I alone would execute the objet d’art (while he cleaned the brushes, answered the phone, and chased away solicitors), he was obviously hurt, but he seemed to accept my explanation.
“I have no doubt you could handle this commission, Cyril, but it’s karmically correct for me and nobody else to tell the joke.”
Thus it was that, for eighteen continuous hours, amid the fierce humidity of an unforgiving August, a supremely meaningless painting came into being. There was no need for us to try hanging the thing. We merely moved it to the back of the studio and pinched it between the adjacent walls. Cyril proposed to call it Beyond the Pale. I laughed, and we both knew the name would stick.
On Thursday afternoon I sought out my landlord, explaining that I wanted to shutter my skylight during the imminent eclipse. His assent came with a price tag of five hundred dollars. The following morning, as Beyond the Pale went from wet to tacky, two unionized carpenters covered the skylight with pine planks and tar paper. Shortly after noon they drilled a hole in the central shutter and installed the prescribed iris diaphragm over the aperture.
“I’ve got a class,” said Cyril, shouldering his backpack. “See you on Monday.”
“You needn’t return on my account,” I said.
“What self-respecting art student would miss an opportunity to witness a total solar eclipse with Leonard Moncaster? Or the chance to meet a crazy person who pays thirty thousand dollars for a billboard advertising whiteness?”
When Olivia Guzetti casually brought Isaac Newton into our conversation, I’d experienced a fleeting intimation that her unnamed employer might be my ex-wife. And so I was not entirely surprised when Olivia reappeared in the studio on Monday morning accompanied by Dr. Stephanie Beswick, professor of physics at Princeton University. Saying nothing, Stephanie set down her satchel and studied the skylight shutters. The lever on the iris diaphragm was thrown all the way to the left, so that the overlapping metal plates admitted only a pinprick of sunlight.
“Hi there, Steph,” I said.
“This will do,” she replied, pursing her lips.
Next she examined Beyond the Pale as it appeared under the electric lights—a floor lamp and two table lamps—I’d rigged up to compensate for the loss of the sun. I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years. The interval had scored us both with wrinkles, eye pouches, and gray hairs, yet she exhibited an elegance to which my own aging flesh could never aspire.
“It looks better under proper illumination, but somebody made me board up the skylight,” I said. “But why come to me, Steph? Even you could create the likes of Beyond the Pale.”
“I need your eyes, Lenny.”
“They aren’t for sale.”
“Your eyes, your visual acuity, your ideally situated studio. If I’d shown up here last week instead of Olivia, you would’ve told me to fuck off, right?”
“Right.”
“By the way, we’re getting married next April.”
“No, dear, we already tried that,” I said.
“Olivia teaches philosophy at Yale. You’re invited to the wedding.”
“I’m busy that day.”
My ex-wife’s fiancée handed me the second $15,000 check.
“As Steph may have mentioned, our marriage was the kind people call stormy,” I told the philosopher. “Considering the spectrum of her affections, I’m amazed it lasted six years. Shall I tell you her worst habits, or do you like surprises?”
Now Cyril sauntered through the door, just in time to help Stephanie and Olivia shift my worktable to the center of the room. From her satchel Stephanie removed a pyramid as large, black, and glossy as a bowling ball, its three equilateral triangles resting on a base covered in green felt. She clunked the pyramid on the table, then aligned one slanted, triangular face with the white canvas.
“Behold Newton’s prism.”
“Glass?” I said. “Obsidian?”
“Both—and neither. He compounded a raw block of the stuff while practicing alchemy at Cambridge. On a whim he called it quoxite.”
Elaborating, Stephanie told me of Newton’s belief that a three sided pyramidal prism carved from quoxite could be made to reveal “certain heretofore hidden properties of darkness,” though the demonstration would require two additional resources, “a total solar eclipse and a canvas wrought from Paracelsus’s pigment recipe.” Upon calculating that the moon would obscure the sun in a matter of weeks—on the twenty-second of August 1672—Newton brewed a half dozen jars of pigment, packed up his quoxite block, and set off for The Hague.
“The best place for observing the eclipse?” I asked.
“No, he went to Holland to find a philosopher, Baruch de Spinoza.”
“The two hit it off immediately—birds of a heretical feather,” said Olivia. “As an Arian Christian who rejected Trinitarianism, Newton was denied an appointment at Cambridge, and Spinoza had been ostracized by the Amsterdam rabbis for denying the divine origins of Hebrew scripture. He passed his final years in The Hague, grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes.”
“Day after day, Spinoza worked the quoxite block, until the prism emerged in all its dark splendor,” said Stephanie. “But before he could perform the experiment, Newton needed one more asset—a person with unusual sensitivity to light and color. Spinoza’s eyes had been damaged by his trade, and Newton’s weren’t equal to the task either.”
“Fun fact,” said Olivia. “In his youth Newton occasionally
pushed a steel needle behind his eyeball to learn about the workings of the human retina. Contrary to legend, he never actually pierced his cornea.”
As luck would have it, Stephanie explained, Spinoza’s favorite painter lived only twelve miles away, in Delft, a town Newton could easily reach before the day of the eclipse. Sadly, neither Newton nor Jan Vermeer left behind an account of what happened next, though a cryptic entry in Vermeer’s diary suggests Newton talked him into mixing up some Paracelsus oil and creating a white canvas.
“Whether they actually attempted an alignment of eclipse, prism, and painting is uncertain,” said Olivia.
“God knows what a blank Vermeer would fetch today,” I said. “Rather more than Beyond the Pale.”
“Stop calling it that,” said Stephanie. “At Sotheby’s, the quoxite pyramid was paired with an English-language manuscript—seventy pages of text and diagrams in Newton’s inimitable hand. He’d titled it, ‘Nocturnomicon, a Treatise Concerning the Triune Theory of Darkness.’ The catalog argued it was a missing chapter from the Opticks, but I have my doubts.”
“I hear they put all sorts of treasures on the block at Sotheby’s these days,” I said. “Good God, Steph, I hope you didn’t invest in Newton’s prism instead of Action Comics Number One.”
“Why don’t you take your thirty thousand dollars and buy a sense of humor?” said Olivia.
“According to the Nocturnomicon,” said Stephanie, “darkness comprises three discrete—but entangled—dimensions or bands or species.” She pointed to the prism face nearest Beyond the Pale. “To indicate the most elemental species, paleodarkness, Newton used the capital Greek letter Psi.”
I fixed on the equilateral triangle in question, rubbing the little Ψ etched directly below the apex.
“Moving clockwise,” said Stephanie, “we come to a denser dimension, teleodarkness, for which Newton used a Phi.”
I stroked the Φ near the top of the second triangle.
“Finally, there is omnidarkness, which Newton marked with an Omega.”
I probed the Ω on the third triangle.
“Separate Psi from Phi and Omega,” said Stephanie, “and you will have created, in Newton’s words, ‘not simply a new sort of radiation but a new sort of world, ethereal, elusive, yet accessible to human curiosity.’ Isolated from its brethren, Phi also becomes a zone unto itself, ‘volatile as phosphorus,’ as Newton put it, ‘but constituting a region no serious natural philosopher would forbear to explore.’ Omega darkness is likewise both transient and knowable.”
Nocturnals Page 6
