_____ (1) Pockets are like subway cars — profoundly democratic, messy, jumbled and crammed. Silver bracelet rubs elbows with snot-fed Kleenex and clings to its strap.
(2) I borrowed a friend’s coat and then he moved to Florida, so it is mine now. But it is pocketless. Sometimes I flail like an infant at the sides as if that might conjure them into being.
(((()))) If the string theorists are right, the universe teems with hidden dimensions; pockets abound. To make even a single new one, then, is to play at being God.
Altered Native
1. Crossing Tahiti off his itinerary, Gauguin heads instead for points north in his gambit to ditch civilization. The more his mind has lolled in the tropics, the more convinced he’s become that the languorous heat, syrupy voyeurism, and ornate adzes will merely reiterate Parisian clamor and clutter sans the solace of steaming coffee and pain. Greenland — now that promises true primitivism. Shifting ice tetrahedrons, shuddering rumbles, and terns’ glancing landings will translate nature morte more exactly than gaudy mangoes.
2. At Sennelier, he stocks up on paint: first the blancs, de Troyes, de Lunare, de céruse, d’argent, crème, ivoire, and then some rouge and marron, and even, in case there’s some verity to the name, vert malachite. He procures wool skeins & the least imposing harpoon he can find.
3. Arrives tremulous in port of Nuuk, a longhaired French bohemian in a cowboy chapeau. For months, he has scrutinized salt form from his table’s edges, model clumps and ice glares he built to apprentice himself. Still, the real ones nearly blind him. Blinking and muttering profanities, he catches laughter from sources he can’t tie a line to. All this numbness, and yet these sting. From children, the three-pronged bombardment — stares, jeers, and a single snowball — fazes him only till his eyes return. He imagines they are critics from the Sorbonne and doffs his hat with a contemptuous flourish.
4. Dinner with the governor. In awe of the plushness of the quarters with which they’ve provided him. He struts his title of “painter in residence.” The commissions will surely start rolling in. Any day now. He writes as much to Mette, to whom he is still wedded, making sure to include a special note to Aline, favorite daughter, his maman’s namesake. One day he intercepts whispers about a meat market. When he inquires, his hand is made a map by calloused fingers, but at the appointed hour, parting the beads, he finds naught but putrid piles of fish. He purchases one so as not to offend and wonders if he can render paint from their oil, the metallic glow like souls still hovering around their corpses.
5. It’s not too hard to find revelers to gambol with under midnight sun. What Impressionists could do with this light; what Vincent would do with it! This long hair, he thinks, must go — it freezes stiff, like his brushes. But no, he catches himself after a swipe with the paint-flecked razor; how impetuous, what madness to bare his scalp to such conditions. Commissions, too, have frozen, leaving his strokes brusque and scattered. One morning, he decides he’s a Shiverist, an offshoot of Pointillists, but by afternoon he retracts it: too derivative of Seurat and “his damned dots.” Which to learn — Danish, Norse, or one of the Inuit tongues? Wavering, he makes sentences from slats of each and is permutatively misunderstood. Regaling the locals with stories of his time in Copenhagen, he never knows they’ve pegged him as a Danish spy. Behind his back: “Gauguile.”
6. Nauseated by niceties, he trades his lavish room for a turf hut — lean, gray, away from the heart of town. The light is relentless, it finds him, harasses him, and yet he can’t cease thinking of dark skin buried under textile strata. A centimeter’s exposure here is the purest coquetry.
7. Nuuk has too much of the waft of Copenhagen; he must find the prelapsarian, the primordial. This hunger and a kayak bring him to craggy Kangeq, twelve kilometers distant, the Giverny of the late Aron von Kangeq, a painter, an Inuit master, he decides. He makes it his business to see some Kangeqs. Mon Dieu! Is that walrus attacking the nude woman or is it performing cunnilingus on her? Is the man at her side attempting rescue or cheering both on? Returning to Nuuk, he will allow himself to be tutored by this tupilak, will in short order produce his own Manao Tupapau. Which will shock Paris more — the girl whose nubility he makes no attempt to obscure, or the hooded walrus looking on, big death longing for little death?
8. Missing his bidet, he nonetheless learns to crap with gusto and hitch up his trousers with native dexterity and aplomb.
9. Nightly he falls skin to skin with one or another non-Mette, some as young as Aline, though the numbers aren’t spoken. It is the layers of heat, also without number, from outer to innermost that he most wants to capture in paint, and where he feels acutest failure. Other failures, those as husband and father, are only temporary, he reminds himself; one day he will reunite with them.
10. Darkness gradually usurps all. He works in the hut but dreams an igloo of Sistine proportions, alighting on a ladder like Michelangelo to fresco the underbelly of snow. Disoriented when he awakens, he staggers outside. The moon and stars collude in faint illumination; his blancs have ceded to various shades of dim. He should’ve brought gris but it will take half a year to arrive now from across the ocean. To think months ago he shunned light, hid from it! The pictures of Mette and children that he’s propped up around the room along with his own paintings: often he cannot make them out.
11. Still he paints. And paints and paints. And carves and carves. Canvases rim the room: The Little Dreamer, The Man with the Ax, the sprawling Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? He surveys this last from right to left: an infant in a furtufted amauti; at center canvas the tree of life, its trunk an upthrust seal, with an Eve who reaches for an apple bitten as yet only by frost, and across the left he has captured three afterlives: Agneriartarfik lush with berries and caribou, Noqumiut for the lazy hunters, sentenced to a diet of butterflies, and lastly Agelermiut, where the seasons barter their features back and forth. It is, he knows, a masterpiece.
12. He decides carvings will not be his legacy. To heat he burns some, burns others to work by.
13. Blowing warm, clear crystals to lithen his brushes, he knows with certainty he’s stumbled on paradise.