Life After...

Paul opened his eyes as the first sun rays hit the framed poster hanging on the wall. Facing it was a narrow window, a little to the left, behind an old fashioned bed occupying almost half of the room. The stream of light that left the sun precisely eight minutes ago would travel the last eight feet of its voyage apparently unaware of the life-giving magic  that it was about to perform.  Paul, the consequential creation of that magical act gained awareness of the moment as the first wave of photons crossed the room. The effect triggered by the reflection wouldn’t last long, but by now it became a morning ritual when the bouncing light would land on Karen’s retina, making the pastel colors of the hanging print the first thing she would see opening her eyes. “Castle and Sun” was the title -  a world filled with dreams, music and poetry. ”A mysterious concoction of Surreal blended with Cubist elements, seducing the eye with a child’s playful exuberance”…  – at least that’s how it was described in the Sotheby’s catalog where she first spotted it. Paul knew about it because the catalog has been lying on the night table for weeks after Karen decided to order on line the print. However, the image in the catalog has been enough to bring him around again and again and introduce him gradually into the private world of his new life-giver. His presence in Karen’s room was hard to define in plain words. He was kind of all over the place but his vision was carried by his hostess’ eyes so his trajectories were linked to her routines. This morning the light was brilliant and vibrant and Paul managed to get closer to see better the delicate lines and the subtle color combinations that made his painting so appealing. He was stunned by the quality of the prints these days. Details could be seen down to an almost tactile perception. The intricate composition was probably the reason Karen picked up this particular piece for the bedroom. Often her gaze would wander in a dream-like state through the endless imaginary rooms of the Castle, inhabited by deep colors and hues, a labyrinth where light gets lost and forgets its unperishable nature. She installed one of those special lamps to  look at this surreal  world even after the rest of the house was drowned in darkness. She would doze off while the bouncing messages loaded with myriads of stories dissimulated into colors would travel down from the print on the wall through the barely open eye lashes to find coherence under her eyelids. Paul remembered how in the same dream-like state, facing a similar narrow window overlooking the forever gray skyline of his adoptive city, he traced the first lines of his imaginary castle.  Munich was one of those
 choices that come to you on a silver tray, but without a weather forecast. The teaching job allowed him to experiment, methodically with a wide range of painting techniques and materials. Looking at it closer Paul could recall the penetrating smell of the India ink, the noise made by the steel nib on the textured paper, the smooth gliding of the brush spreading the eager to impress pigments onto the fields of carefully drawn rectangles. He has painted it after his visit to Tunisia and became smitten with the color and light his whole being absorbed there. The long walks with his friend August in “the luminous Kingdom of Light”, how he used to call it, mades color a stronger part of his new sense of perception (understanding). Color became a subtle underlining to his thoughts, a new dimension to his inner world where previously a mono-chrome vision was reigning. In contrast with the drab autumn colors in Munich, his work looked like an attempt to escape from the gray reality surrounding him, a refuge from the memories of the war years when he had to paint endlessly the monotone camouflage patterns on the Kaiser’s airplanes.

 Paul enjoyed the brief moments spent in Karen’s crammed apartment. Her nearly religious morning greeting, her thoughts of him often lingering into the time of departure for work, allowed Paul to discover surprising aspects of her personality. He could tell that on a cloudy day she would become meditative and think of her sad years back in Belgium, or that listening to Bach’s music would make her cry and crave for strawberry lintzer. However he still couldn't find out what was her line of work, what was she doing when out of that heavy squeaky door.  Strange, one would assume, but not to Paul, at least not anymore. During these frugal bits of existence he had the choice to be anywhere his mind would take him, but the comfort of Karen’s joy, when looking at the image of his painting made him stay there, content and unaware of time or purpose. His idealist metaphysics seemed to have found a fertile ground around her luminous psyche. The vivid mosaic of washes had always an uplifting effect on Karen and her first thought of the day would invariably go to Paul. It was just a poster, easy to find on E-bay for $15.99, but it did the trick – he was “in” for another brief interlude, collecting dividends .
The list  of  his "regular life-givers" was huge but there were a few  favorites like the jovial new-yorker Peter Casper the owner of a print of “Southern Gardens”, Mattia Duval from Milan who inherited “Dream City” from his uncle Giorgio together with his wit or the refined Nakao Myabi from Kyoto who had one of his early drawings. These were characters  that would stay with Paul long enough to become something like an extended family. Or little Mabel Williams from Athens, Tennessee, who was using a reproduction of his painting “Two Heads” as an orientation map for her mental journeys, while her father would lecture her about  the virtues of punctuality.  Paul often remembered when Norton bought the original and gave him one of the footholds in the universe of the rich and famous.  Now the painting, hanging in the museum he has founded, was bringing Paul a long stream of Californian “time shares”. Like most “museum time” as he chose to name it, these intervals were used for chores, for making order in his own thoughts, in developing his new persona away from the physical world. It was not what one would call “quality time”. There were just bits and pieces of an amorphous mass of thoughts, never enough to get to know someone, and used to search for a reason to exist. He could never remember much from those brief encounters – a kaleidoscope of beauty and triviality mixed together into a painful noise.

“Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses; the history of the training of this most fundamental and elusive of human powers will plunge us into deep waters.” Said Francis Yates in his “The Art of Memory”, one of Paul’s favorite readings. He was often wondering if the after-death journeys would take place within the space of one’s mind or if it would extend  through other connected minds into the outer space.

“I wonder how much she really knows about me..” was his thought while feeling the nearing void. There was always a slow down in his awareness before the imminent interruption. He could never manage to go through with the guessing game about his so called “hosts”. He had little time to look around Karen’s messy interior. His legendary pedantry made him cringe when trying to snoop into the piles of unopened mail, books, newspapers, sometimes even paper plates with leftovers from previous night’s TV dinner. For Paul, who was writing down how many times he would sharpen his pens it was a completly alien world. He couldn’t understand how she managed to live there, but it didn’t take to be a private eye to see loneliness written al over Karen’s life. He often felt overwhelmed with waves of sympathy and sorrow for her. Now, after decades of practice, he could feel an intimate kinship with those who didn’t seem to belong anywhere. Loneliness was his only constant  and paradox companion, one could say. Oh, how he missed now Lily! Before fading away, Paul recalled the words, his devoted wife, engraved on his tombstone – “I belong not only to this life. I live as well with the dead, as with those not born. Nearer to the heart of creation than others, but still too far.” Paul Klee 1879 – 1940.



Sasha Meret, Long Island, 2008



…death is a harbor with invisible piers….