Читать книгу This Place of Prose and Poetry - Lucian Krukowski - Страница 10

One day, when I was in fourth grade, I was transferred to a room that had tables around which students sat, perhaps eight to a table, so that they could look directly at each other. This was a big improvement over my other room, the standard one, in which everyone sat facing front in those one piece chair-desks that seem designed to slowly but inexorably deform young bones. I’m not sure why I was transferred; it was the middle of the term, so I thought I was being promoted.

It had to be so; I had never seen a classroom like the one I now was in—large bright lights, with complicated smells of paint and paste, and pictures and maps all over the walls. The students, none of whom I knew, also seemed complicated. They looked better than the other ones, didn’t seem afraid to move about the room, and were all doing different things. They looked like what are now called high-achievers.

I had not been achieving much in school; mostly I was being yelled at. I take yelling to be a more assaultive version of loud speech than shouting; the rare moments of physical fury in my later life usually came in response to someone’s yelling at me. But back then, in public school, I mostly sat still until it stopped, or looked away pretending it wasn’t directed at me. There was little point in trying to reach for origins, causes, reasons. The episodes erupted and passed by too quickly; they were natural phenomena as were the teachers, not to be talked to—but the violence of the sounds made me wary. Considered as language, the yellings were like parentheses around periods of droning—they didn’t define these periods, but they did give them a shape—an early example of parameters. But watching out for them made it difficult for me to attend to the matter of the dronings in between. If what passed between the parentheses were the subjects being studied, I don’t remember knowing what they were.

It now seems probable that my transfer to the class with tables was not a promotion, as I then thought, but a trial balloon: Seeing that I was getting nowhere (I was, but not their where) they sent me upstairs. At worst, two minuses (eventually) add up to a plus; in this (my) case, I was sent to see what a minus and a plus would come to.

The new teacher—although I thought that she eyed me with suspicion—gave me a place at one of the tables, said some thing about a project, and left me to the stares, quite self-assured, of the other students. Things were pleasant enough for a few days; I fiddled with finding a project, and practiced looking around. Then a girl at my table raised her hand: “That boy (pointing to me) is picking his nose. It’s disgusting and makes me feel like throwing up.” Well, how better to get at a Polish boy than to accuse him of nose-picking. I denied it, waving my hands and saying (I lapsed into my father’s accent) that I was merely touching my nose—and there the matter rested for a while. I could not look at the girl, nor at anyone—but after some moments my finger drifted, to my amazement, back up to my nose. “There, see, he’s doing it again.” “I saw you this time” said teacher, her eyes beady as a bird’s. (People often turn into animals when I get into trouble). Then there ensued a lot of “if you do this again,” “not decent,” “other people’s feelings,” “don’t you have a handkerchief?” (another ethnic slur), and I was put at a different table. I remember after that I left my nose alone; I had learned something and so I was not transferred back to the yelling class.

There was another room with larger tables where, twice a week in the afternoon, we would go to “art”—but it might well have been “science.” By that time, I could identify different subjects, although they sometimes got mixed up. The fault was not entirely mine however. In all our classes, teachers demonstrated success through tangible objects—“projects”—that could be spread about, pinned up on walls, and displayed to principals, important visitors, even to those occasional parents who had reason to come by.

So in each of our classes, whatever its nominal subject, we cut and pasted, folded and hammered, painted and drew. Although, in later years, I did a lot of cutting and pasting, I didn’t then. With so many hands in the act, everything was always being covered with paste and paint; my fingers and clothing would get sticky, which bothered me and upset my mother. So I drew—on clean white paper with a pencil.

We must have been studying electricity in another class—but the word came down, because I was given the project of drawing a light-bulb. This was no ordinary in-class job, but an over-the-weekend, on white matte-board, large scale, soul-is-on-the-line job. I remember spending Friday night holding a lightbulb, like Yorick’s head, in my hand, and thinking melancholy thoughts. Saturday I drew the shape freehand, stepping back from time to time to see how close to perfection I was getting. Much later I saw a movie in which an artist (Laughton as Rembrandt, I think) would step back to check on the progress of his masterpiece. I felt precocious. I drew the innards of the bulb very exactly: the filaments and coils, and the strange lumpy glass in which they were embedded—or emerging from—an ancient sprouting, as I thought. Yes, it was alive, my bulb, but with the eternal life of a fossil. I had, by then, been to the Museum of Natural History. My bulb was all bones, a dinosaur of pure form. Sunday I colored it sparingly using colored pencils that I sharpened with the kitchen knife. I used blues, greens, and grays, and I remember the result as cool, transparent, and distant, which I accepted as being what I wanted. There was a day of waiting, but I didn’t touch the drawing again. I had stepped back; returned to look; it was finished.

But I must tell you that I wasn’t the only one chosen for that assignment. There was another boy, someone I didn’t know (a dangerous omen) who was also coming in on Tuesday with his own light-bulb project. And then teacher, a big bustly chickadee, put them, his and mine, up on the wall side by side. It has always amazed me how my paintings look when away from my studio. They look comparative; not showing what they are, but what they do not have that others have. Such “not-having” is not always bad, of course; maturity, as I later learned, is a lot about not wanting what others have. But at this moment, I felt vanquished. The other boy’s light-bulb was yellow. He had painted the light, the glow, the radiance, the living life. I hadn’t even turned mine on; mine had no movement, no personality; I had made a corpse. Teacher asked for a show of preference, and mine lost; light and life is where it’s at, of course. Then she spoke at length about the impropriety of comparing (which she had just asked us to do)—and this because each drawing has its own qualities that are valuable—in themselves. But she didn’t believe it—and neither did the other students.

For me, however, a value of “in itself” was a new and appealing notion. Art became a subject I could understand—a first lesson in the conflict between empathy and abstraction, and a primer in the politics of opportunistic relativism.

The drawings hung side by side for a long time. Nobody looked at them after the first day (another lesson) and when the term ended and I took mine home, I found that I had come to like it because of what it did not have.