XVI

Conflict, as catalyst for change, is desirable if we assume that change, call it growth or evolution, is desirable. While my life in Tuscany was good, unattained creative goals overrode my short term aspirations for food and society. Maslow would not appreciate my priorities. In any case, the current state could not be maintained. If I was to gain access to beauty, I believed that I would never have a better opportunity. The secret though would need to be unlocked before any of three events came to pass.

Firstly, finances were finite. I could live not much longer without taking paid employment, literally. I took a meal every second day and that was often little more than meat and bread. Twice now I had fainted in public. The awkward, enlightening euphoria that overwhelms one just preceding such swoonings is not enough to recommend them. That moment of bliss is instantly eclipsed by a nauseating awareness of embarrassment. Shame is the last sensation I felt and it was also the first to greet me on returning to a corporeal state.

My body had thinned alarmingly. It could not be sustained. My credit, both institutional and blooded, was nearly exhausted. Taking a twenty-dollar advance on my credit card could thinly feed me for a week but then there were canvases and model fees. I did, in several instances, find myself making aesthetic choices based on the cost of paints. The paintings grew smaller as I grew leaner.

The second harbinger of defeat was madness. The scent of insanity lingered in my apartment. The ghosts of depression haunted my lonely nights. Time and again I needed to seize control of my senses and not allow them to fail my mind. I had no more faith in my ears and eyes. Proof was demanded. If I was destroying my body it was essential that I maintain my imagination and that meant keeping it firmly under control. It has always been my practice to wave off any fantasy that dared to take form. I will not be seduced by such phantasms. I dare not, for such temptations appear to me ever, as I imagine they do to us each. My nature though is obsessive. Should I clutch onto a fantasy and let her talons stake themselves into my chest, I should never again be parted from her. The wanderings of my conscious mind I can strive to impress restraint and order upon. Where my subconscious self wanders, and what it finds, I am blind to. So while I spurned any play of possibilities or those dreams of one day being a great artist, it cannot be sworn to that my sentient pursuits were not on the scent of such, no matter how much I believed that I was hunting the purity of beauty. Though my thoughts remained sensical, could I trust them to remain thus for much longer. If madness did overtake me, what hope did I have of catching art?

The third deadline was the coming of Beatrice. Seven years before, I'd put her portrait at her door. She had rejected the piece and in that choice, how could I not read it as a rejection of me. She might have been struck by the savage truth and splendor of the painting so that within five minutes she would be summoning Anne to achieve contact with me. Even if my intentions had been as earnest and pure as I had imagined them to be, the act was an invitation to pass judgement upon me as an artist and as a man. Similarly, despite Beatrice having absolutely neither incentive nor obligation to pronounce her judgements, it should be considered quite natural that I should take distant silence as certain dismissal. I had failed at something that I was certain that I had never attempted. Beatrice was coming. In the course of our congress, it would come to pass that she would judge my virtues anew. It was essential that I pass inspection this time. By Christmas, I must prove myself a genius.

Worse, I must become great. I had to learn. Amid this almost desperate bloom of creativity, when life was springing from my fingertips, I had to find the patience, the awareness, to pluck weeds from my produce. When I was by some muse emboldened to make, I needed the will to check that energy with reason. It is not through doing that one learns but only by recognizing what has been done. If, in splendid fits of energy, one can craft a sublime line that echoes the feminine contour, it is wasted if the draughtsman cannot step back and say precisely what was done. The 'why' may follow on but it must still come.

I have stood entranced, fair ensorcelled, before a canvas and there made beautiful marks that left me startled by the inferred potential. That bliss though ceases when I realise that it is but happy accident. I am instantly overcome by shame then. Shame for my hubris, my pride, when it had nothing whatsoever that I could claim as mine. Stand amid the Piazza della Signoria and find me a happy accident.

There is an adage that some in the arts will bring out as occasion demands: that you must destroy your favourite part of a piece. Balance and equality cannot otherwise be achieved. It is not quite the same as suggesting that a mother murder her favourite child. My own application of the adage is that I ought destroy my happy accidents. Nothing adorns the canvas that is not there by design. This Spartan philosophy, when confronted with the aesthetics of photography, resulted in my failing out of my first attempt at art school. It also confounds my paintings from time to time. Palette knives have scraped off many of Fortune's fine offerings. If I recognize the merits of something unintended, decide that it may stay, I then require myself to study it, understand it, and then destroy it. Only if it can be replicated, do I deserve to claim it. Only by proving that it is under my control, does beauty earn the right to be in my paintings.

There then again is hubris. I will dictate my terms to Fortune and Beauty. There can be no compromise. It must be total submission. They will be subjugated. Can one wonder then that the war was waged without resolution? How does one so entirely committed to the belief that beauty lies in harmony, become so loathsome of concession and compromise?

Stupidity is bred from Arrogance, which is itself a child of isolation. We do not learn alone. All that we can take from solitude is certainty.

The brain is wired such that, left in a jar upon a shelf, it would continue to fire off thoughts and dreams toward eternity. What it cannot do though it consciously rewire itself. Denied stimuli, it would settle itself into stable patterns of thought and then would generate the same ideas and believe the same beliefs until an exasperated technician pulled the plug. Nature, yes, can put a shoulder to the task of unsticking our rutted minds but for pulling, you require friends.

XVII