The Story of the Painter
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eanwhile late summer has come, or early fall already, and the painter is lying, his materials next to him, facedown on a bed of flint in the shade of the only bush at a bend in the RÃo Duero, at his head the steep, high, reddish-yellow sandstone terrace overlooking the river, and up above, already far off, Toro, with its façades of the same color, in the province of Zamora on the
meseta
of western Castile, about seven hundred fifty meters above the level of the Mediterranean at Alicante, while the painter is lying about one hundred meters lower.
The large birds surrounding the painter now in midafternoon are not ravens; they also have beaks too straight and too long for vultures; are they pelicans?âone of them is holding a fish crosswiseâflamingos? no, they are storks, which, with their heads bent over their backs, burst out in squawks, one after the other, so that in the deserted and quiet river landscape it echoes like the so-called
Ratschen
back home on the Jaunfeld, the rattles that replace the church bells during Holy Week until the celebration of the Resurrection.
At some distance from the painter, down there by the bend in the river, on the almost white, almost glassy expanse of flintstone (I have a few lumps of it here on my desk and can smell the sparks in them), are lying fat dead fish, carp and pike, both gleaming gold from the solid
coats of flies covering them; the gills of one of the fish are still pulsing, but they, too, are already swarming with flies.
Every morning, upon making his way down from Toro, the painter wanted to ask the fishermen why they simply left some of their catch lying on the bank, and precisely the finest specimens; to this day he does not know. Although he is a Spaniardâhe never calls himself Catalanâthere are many customs in his own country that even now, when his hair has turned gray, remain a mystery to him, one he is reluctant to solve.
Meanwhile the fishermen are having their meal at the barrackslike bar under the poplar trees on the other side of the Roman bridge, whose low, squat, round arches let through the RÃo Duero, here white with cataracts, with a roar that scales the steep banks and penetrates far into the streets of the town, but at the bend where the painter is lying is audible only as some soft, windlike sound belonging to the expansive, bald Spanish or Indian summer silence.
It is already approaching evening, and at the foot of the earthen terrace, hardly visible for a moment between two of its foothills, as in the gap in a canyon, the storm-dark Talgo flashes by, the daily express from Madrid to Vigo and La Coruña, which does not stop in Toro, glimpsed just long enough for the silhouette of a passenger to appear behind the tinted window of the bar car; and then, at the next curve in the tracks, which follow the river, between the cliffs, again that Mississippi-wide tooting in the echo of the roar and whistle of this railway thing, as graceful as it is heavy, from which the entire fisherman's pub on the other side jingles and jangles; this now you see me! now you don't! is something the painter has not allowed himself to miss once in all his weeks here; and the way it slices through the alluvial plane appeared to him daily as a plowing up of the entire earth and at the same time catapulted him into a previously unknown loneliness. Up! Back to work!
So was it still possible, now near the end of the twentieth century, to be motivated and stimulated, as once in the age of the great engineers, by a machine, the sight of it, its sound, its speed, undeterred even by the thought of a catastrophe right around the next corner?
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as he still “the painter”? (He allowed himself to be called a “filmmaker” or “cinéaste,” despite his film, long since finished and even shown here and there, only with a modest step to one side, as if to make way for someone else.)
He had begun to paint long ago with a particular notion of distance, which, however, did not then become a feature of his paintings. The distance was there beforehand: his original imageâthe thing that motivated himâhis starting point. It determined him.
And now, as a result of his one role change to filmmaking? as a result of all that went with and came after it? as a result of what? he had lost that distance, his material? Once and for all? So what had this strange phenomenon, about which he had found nothing, not even in the textbook on “psychogeometry,” meant to him in the past?
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hat distance had appeared to him way back in childhood as the blackness he saw when he closed his eyes.
Yet since birth he had fixed his gaze on the most distant horizon possible: from Tarragona in the direction of the sunrise, out over the Mediterranean, overlooking which, people said, the city lay as a “balcony.” The sense of distance he got from this was, however, one of apprehension, in the face of the emptiness and the height, and the infrequent ships or boats in the middle distance did not suggest safety. The inky or steely or leaden blue also contributed to his impression that in this boundlessness there was no destination, or, if there was, then over in ancient Rome, where, he was sure, one of his ancestors who had been dragged away from his coast had ended his life as a slave or as lion fodder.
With eyes closed, he saw an entirely different distance. In all the blackness something like a harbor took shape, where he saw himself safely anchored.
And it was even more: in the black expanse, which did not seem all that black, but shot through with thousands of variegated little brigh-tenings, without movement, something was constantly being danced, played, sung, narrated, drawn, as a model for him. “Model for,” for it was not a question of images copied “from” anything. Besides, copies consisted only of foreground, and moved, vibrated, shrank, grew, as if
on their own, while his stories in the blackness took place in the most distant background possible, and the movement he perceived in them seemed to come from him himselfâfrom his heartbeat? no, for that it was too light, too disembodiedâfrom his lungs? for that it was too quickâfrom his brain? for that it was too even, too powerful in imagery, too comprehensive, too intimate, too childlike.
It was even stranger that closing his eyes, without crossing them in the least, he could look away from the distant black happenings and then continue to watch them, except that the distance now shifted from its place behind his closed lids into his innermost self and became something whole, “one and all.”
To be sure, that happened during his childhood only when he was lying in bed, as he was waking up in the morning. So were they images between waking and sleeping? No, neither copied images nor images between waking and sleeping. For the distance behind his eyes, he had to have had a good sleep and be well beyond the boundary of dreams, clearheaded, and the distance also did not create concrete images, as the state between waking and sleeping created still lives, for instance, especially of landscapes, and it also dispensed with the succession of spaces characteristic of that other state, indeed with space altogether; the distance itself was enough. And nevertheless it was active, and what it did was to produce an effect. Produce what effect? This constant, marvelously delicate movement in him and at the same time independent of him, without beginning or end, a sort of motionlessly moving repeated figure in the blackness, drawn to guide him.
And then with the years, he could say, paraphrasing Paul Klee, “The distance and I are one, I am a painter.”
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et it was something else again to get down to the images and get down to work. That was where painting began, art. It was not reproduction that counted but metamorphosis, or reproduction through metamorphosis. The starting point disappeared into it, or was absorbed into it. What was drawn for him, his model, formed only the bottom layer, and with scraping would perhaps have actually come to light sometimes, the mere appearance standing in baffling contradiction to the completed picture. For this he not only had to displace the original
image, set it on its head, but also, so far as it was within his strength, invent things to add as well as subtract, so that as a rule something entirely new emerged in the end.
Precisely through such energetic distortions he could then, with reference to the distance, say of each picture: “I have reinforced a presence.” And it had been a long time since the painter experienced his source of motivation only with eyes closed, when lying down. And on the other hand, he still found nothing in just any old distant blue, or red, or yellow. The location of his particular distance was somewhere nearer, could shimmer out at him from a clump of earth, mixed with stones and wood, at the tips of his toes, or when the colors of someone's eyes transmitted themselves to him from close up, also, in the mirror, his own (Black Sea black).
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his distance could be most reliably tracked down, at least before his involvement with film, in a very specific visual realm.
That realm began at a certain remove from the eye, and yet long before what is commonly referred to as distance. The path leading to it was difficult to measure; earlier people would have said, for instance, “a stone's throw” (how large was such a stone, and who was throwing it?). And then the sense of distance was limited to a rather narrow strip or spot; if he looked out past it, just a bit, that promptly put an end to the distance, even if the high sea spread before him or the grassy lane swept into a savanna.
Thus distance appeared, just begging to be circumscribed and conveyed to the surface of a picture, at the end of a garden, for instance, in front of that wall and the bushes over there, on the ground, in the grass. It revealed itself thus on a pond in the forest, just before the barway on the opposite bank, as a delimited place there on the water, almost no more than a little tip.
And curious, too, that an ordinary meadow was already too spacious for such a unit of distance, while an ordinary backyard was too small. And the same was true of a lake on the one hand and of a mere puddle on the other. To offer material for an image of distance, the yard had to be larger than usual, just as the pond had to extend farther than a pond
usually doesâboth, however, by just a bit, “to be recognized,” “by a factor of one.” And that, to be precise, was the measure of distance.
Only in this way did distance seeing come into being, as was fitting for a law of nature.
At the same time a displacement occurred such as no other distant horizon could bring about, neither that of the Himalayas nor of the Amazon delta: as a result of its limitation or framing, this particular distance drew the painter into a scenery, with a light on the water, on the grass, on the treetops like that in a mirror, and distance literally put in an appearance: there! It will start right there, there is the place to board, it will take place there, it will play itself out there, it will be hatched there, it will become concentrated there, it will catch fire there, it will be spread out there, right over there, in that narrow, limited patch of distance it is clear again, everything is being freshly polished, is gleaming as on the first day of the Creation.
And remarkable again that such distance occurred as if without movement, at any rate with hardly anything's moving noticeably in it. It seemed to the painter as though quiet was a prerequisite for this effect: that the distant grass tip, the distant coast of the forest pond, the distant interwoven pattern of the treetops had to remain nice and still.
Yet the distance over by the garden wall or elsewhere moved him as nothing else could, even the most remote curvature in the universe, and in its presence he thought, “There the world is at peace!”
And it also set him in motion, not toward it, not to circle the pond, in order to dive like a mystic into the distant glow, but in a sidelong direction to appropriate action, creation, spreading the word.
People, many of them, were moved to reflection by his pictures, at first sight so gloomy, and they were happy, even as a crowd, not merely the individuals. Each of his pictures had the same title,
La vega negra
, “The Black Meadow.” Their unusual format, much wider than high, was simply about twice that of my slate in first gradeâexactly right! was my immediate reactionâand likewise every figure or every squiggle, that is, every darker or lighter shading, clearly had its place, its proportion, its distance, just as in classical paintings.
And yet the painter had long since begun to wonder how it happened that, with the passing millennia of human history, distance and images
of distance had become more and more significant in this way, whereas, for instance, imperial Rome, including the poet Horace, whom the painter knew somewhat by heart, had had no interest in such things.
Or was it that the current distantness did not yet exist in the spiritual geometry of those times, or merely as an incidental, or only in slaves (but hadn't Horace's father been a freedman?)? Had it become fundamental only today? As fragments of distance? fragments, yet fundamental?
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hat he earned a good deal of money with what he did was something the painter took for granted. He had it coming to him, and every time a head was shaken at the sums paid by collectors, he countered with his standard “That's the price.” He was “my rich friend”âand doesn't everyone have one such, more or less?