“Don’t just walk stepping everywhere,” Rignolo told his visitors as they all entered the studio. He was a little out of breath from the climb up the stairs, wheezing his words, quietly muttering to himself, “This place, oh, this place.”
There was hardly a patch of floor that was not in some way cluttered over, so he need not have warned Nolon, or even Grissul. Rignolo was of lesser stature than his guests, virtually a dwarf, and so moved with greater freedom through that cramped space. “You see,” he said, “how this isn’t really a room up here, just a little closet that tried to grow into one, bulging out every which way and making all these odd niches and alcoves surrounding us, this shapeless gallery of nooks. There’s a window around here, I suppose, under some of these canvasses. But those are what you’re here for, not to look out some window that who knows where it is. Nothing to see out there, even so.”
Rignolo then ushered his visitors through the shrunken maze composed of recesses of one sort or another, indicating to them a canvass here or there. Each somehow held itself to a wall or was leaning against one, as if with exhaustion. Having brought their attention to this or that picture, he would step a little to the side and allow them to admire his work, standing there like a polite but slightly bored curator of some seldom-visited museum, a pathetic figure attired in oversized clothes of woven … dust. His small ovoid face was as lifeless as a mask: his skin had the same faded complexion as his clothes and was just as slack, flabby; his lips were the same color as his skin but more full and taut; his hair shot out in tufts from his head, uncontrolled, weedy; and his eyes showed too much white, having to all appearances rolled up halfway into his forehead, as if they were trying to peek under it.
While Nolon was gazing at one of Rignolo’s landscapes, Grissul seemed unable to shake off a preoccupation with the artist himself, though he was obviously making the effort. But the more he tried to turn his attention away from Rignolo, the more easily it was drawn back to the flabby skin, the faded complexion, the undisciplined shocks of hair. Finally, Grissul gave a little nudge to Nolon and began to whisper something. Nolon looked at Grissul in a way that might have said, “Yes, I know, but have some sense of decorum in any case,” then resumed his contemplation of Rignolo’s excellent landscapes.
They were all very similar to one another. Given such titles as “Glistening Marsh,” “The Tract of Three Shadows,” and “The Stars, the Hills” they were not intended to resemble as much as suggest the promised scenes. A vague hint of material forms might emerge here and there, some familiar effect of color or outline, but for the most part they could be described as extremely remote in their perspective on tangible reality. Grissul, who was no stranger to some of the locales purportedly depicted in these canvasses, could very well have expressed the objection that these conglomerations of fractured mass, these whirlpools of distorted light, simply did not achieve their purpose, did not in fact deserve connection with the geographical subjects from which they took their titles. Perhaps it was Rignolo’s intuition that just such a protest might be forthcoming that inspired—in the rapid, frantic voice of a startled sleeper—the following outburst.
“Think anything you like about these scenes, it’s all the same to me. Whisper to each other, my hearing is wonderfully bad. Say that my landscapes do not invite one’s eyes to pass into them and wander, let alone linger for the briefest moment. Nevertheless, that is exactly their purpose, and as far as I am concerned they are quite adequate to it, meticulously efficient. I have spent extraordinary lengths of time within the borders of each canvass, both as maker and as casual inhabitant, until the borders no longer exist for me and neither does … that other thing. Understand that when I say inhabitant, I do not in any way mean that I take my clumsy feet tromping up and down staircases of color, or that I stand this stunted body of mine upon some lofty ledge where I can play the master of all I see. There are no masters of these scenes and no seers, because bodies and their organs cannot function there—no place for them to go, nothing to survey with ordinary eyes, no thoughts to think for the mighty brain. And my thoroughfares will not take you from the doorstep of one weariness to the backdoor of another, and they cannot crumble, because they are burdened with nothing to convey—their travelers are already there, continuously arriving at infinite sites of the perpetually astonishing. Yet these sites are also a homeland, and nothing there will ever threaten to become strange. What I mean to say is that to inhabit my landscapes one must, in no figurative sense, grow into them. At best they are a paradise for sleepwalkers, but only those sleepwalkers who never rise to their feet, who forget their destination, and who may thus never reach that ultimate darkness beyond dreams, but may loiter in perpetuity in these lands of mine, which neighbor on nothingness and stand next door to endlessness. So you see, my critics, what we have in these little pictures is a living communion with the void, a vital annihilation and a thoroughly decorative eternity of—”
“All the same,” Grissul interjected, “it does sound unpleasant.”
“You’re interfering,” Nolon said under his breath.
“The old bag of wind,” Grissul said under his.
“And just where do you see the unpleasantness? Where, show me. Nowhere, in my view. One cannot be unpleasant to one’s self, one cannot be strange to oneself.
I claim that all will be different when one is joined with the landscape. We need not go the way of doom when such a hideaway is so near at hand—a land of escape. For the initiated, each of those little swirls is a cove which one may enter into and become; each line—jagged or merely jittery—is a cartographer’s shoreline which may be explored at all points at once; each crinkled wad of radiance is a star basking in its own light, and in yours. This, gentlemen, is a case of making the most of one’s talent for projection. There indeed exist actual locales on which my pictures are based, I admit that. But these places keep their distance from the spectator: whereas my new landscapes make you feel at home, those old ones put you off, hold you at arm’s length, and in the end throw you right out of the picture. That’s the way it is out there—everything looks at you with strange eyes. But you can get around this intolerable situation, jump the fence, so to speak, and trespass into a world where you belong for a change. If my landscapes look unfamiliar to you, it is only because everything looks different from the other side. All this will be understood much more clearly when you have seen my masterwork. Step this way, please.”
Nolon and Grissul glanced blankly at each other and then followed the artist up to a narrow door. Opening the door with a tiny key, Rignolo ushered his guests inside. It was a tight squeeze through the doorway.
“Now this place really is a closet,” Grissul whispered to Nolon. “I don’t think I can turn around.”
“Then we’ll just have to walk out of here backwards, as if there were something wrong with that.”
The door slammed closed and for a moment there was no place on earth darker than that little room.
“Watch the walls,” Rignolo called through the door.
“Walls?” someone whispered.
The first images to appear in the darkness were those crinkled wads of radiance Rignolo spoke of, except these were much larger, more numerous, and became more radiant than the others bound within their cramped little canvasses. And they emerged on all sides of the spectator, above and below as well, so that an irresistible conviction was instilled that the tiny gravelike room had expanded into a starstrewn corridor of night, the certainty created that one was suspended in space without practical means of remaining there. Reaching out for the solid walls, crouching on the floor, only brought confusion rather than relief from the sense of impossibility. The irregular daubs of brightness grew into great silver blotches, each of them ragged at its rim and glowing wildly.