Bright Shards of Someplace Else Read online

  O’Hara, however, seemed too sincere and unsavvy for such sales-manship. He was still lost in explaining the before and after appearance of his cells. “They were downright boring before. I mean, they were drab. My skin cells were just beige little irregular chambers, my blood cells were completely uninspired. Even the bacteria in my gut looked hackneyed. They were nothing, nada, sans thing, el nothito.” O’Hara apparently found some amusement in approximating other languages, an unusual quirk for someone of his education. “But afterwards …” He paused to give his customary lovelorn sigh. “They were sublime.”

  “Hey—I’ve got an idea.” At once overtaken by manic energy, O’Hara began rummaging through the boxes piled about the studio. As his search intensified, he became less concerned with keeping things orderly. He knocked images off the wall as he rushed by without even bothering to see what he had unsettled. At one point, he toppled a rickety microscope but merely giggled when it hit the floor. “Mave can have that one,” he said, referring to his sculptress friend. “She’s been planning on creating a ’scope sculpture as a criticism of the fussy, mechanical way gallery-goers see art. She’d love the big lenses on that one.” Finally, in the bottom of what looked like a tackle box, O’Hara’s search ended. “We’ve got to get a blood smear from you,” O’Hara blurted, simultaneously casting me as both a fellow researcher and willing test subject. “It’s perfectly safe.” O’Hara punctuated this by showing me a trio of lancets, still in their sterile wrapping. “I would love, love, love to get a look at your blood. I’m sure it’s spectacular. After all the art you’ve seen …” He virtually shuddered with pleasure at the thought. Both flattered and curious, I held out my arm for him.

  “Wait.” He again launched into a search, this time for something he called Ethiphet©. “Where is the goddamn Ethiphy?!” This search, much shorter than the last, quickly produced a vial of absinthehued liquid from the recesses of a clearly secondhand file cabinet. “Now just drink this first. It’s a stabilizing agent. Sort of like a coagulant but not quite. What it does is slow the movement of your blood cells so they’ll fix into an image under the slide.” Unconsciously, I had drawn my arms back to my body protectively, the arm formerly offered up now receding behind my back. Another impatient flutter of hands. “For god’s sake, of course it’s safe. It’s sure as hell safer than all the genetically modified food you scarf down without a thought! I’m a biologist. I know the properties of everything in this lab down to the molecule! And I know their effects!” O’Hara’s presumptuousness about my eating habits (scarf?) made me even less inclined to take the “Ethiphy.” “Look. You saw what happened under that slide. The cells shift, the picture’s ruined. Don’t you want to see how beautiful your cells could really look? Who knows? You might be a masterpiece.” O’Hara whispered this last part in my ear, after silently advancing into my space.

  The old observation about people eventually coming to resemble their pets seems doubly true for theorists and their theories. Wittgenstein was as austere and difficult as his theories, living in a highly ordered home and quick to anger over unintelligible slights. Kierkegaard’s theories were innately paradoxical, much like his sex life: he would woo, woo, woo, and then cut out before consummation. (Some biographers claim to have found evidence that Kierkegaard had a curved penis, which would explain his sexual reticence. Even that deformity could be seen as a metaphor for his ideas.) O’Hara himself, likewise, now seemed just as threatening to me as he claims Micro-aestheticism is to science. One could speculate that O’Hara wanted a unified front: man and theory, both at the ready to disturb. And finally illuminate.

  Ultimately, though, neither O’Hara nor Microaestheticism presented any real danger. Or any real illumination. Microaestheticism may be a pleasant diversion, but it simply stands on too many thresholds to truly enter into theoretical discourse. Part science, part art criticism, part New Age feel-goodism, part old-time alchemy. But in the all: not much. The mainstream art world simply won’t accept that its field is mere inaccurate biology, and if O’Hara’s old colleagues are any indication, science will simply banish it, not even granting the acknowledgment of a refutation. It seemed harmless enough, then, to follow O’Hara’s instructions, if only to fully experience what will no doubt come to be known as an amusing hiccup in the history of ideas.

  The Ethiphet© went down easily and seemed to have a numbing effect. O’Hara had already deftly pricked the finger by the time I put the vial down. “It works the minute it hits the gullet,” he said, without explaining this improbability or apologizing for what felt like a pretty rude way to take a blood sample. Wasn’t there a blood-taking etiquette? Unlike someone in the medical profession, who would at least put on an empty show of caring about my well-being (or give some vague comforting comment such as “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”), O’Hara had already moved on, with nary a half-hearted nicety. For lack of a cotton ball or a Band-Aid, O’Hara absently reached over, without taking his eyes off the lancet, and ripped off a paper towel from a soiled-looking roll. But perhaps O’Hara could be excused (or figured he should be) for all his born-of-distraction boorishness: he was, of course, a man of both science and art, leaving little for the prosaic world of manners, bedside or otherwise.

  O’Hara now silently drew the lancet, sheathed thinly with a spread drop of blood, along a slide, then pressed another slide atop it to secure the sample. He slipped the specimen into its proper place under the ’scope lens, securing it with two silver clips. With the herkyjerkyness of someone tired of simply verging on something great, O’Hara nearly leaped to the other side of the table and thrust his head at the eyepiece. He hit it with what looked like enough force to give himself a black eye, yet he didn’t pull back to assess the damage or rub his eyes in chagrined bafflement. Instead, he merely grunted with impatience and reached down to reaffix the slide. Now came another round of ever-so-slight knob spinning, focusing, and refocusing. To the untrained observer he appeared to be undoing everything he did, as every knob turn seemed followed by a knob turn of an equal amount in the opposite direction. To O’Hara, though, progress was being made. Soon enough, he chortled and pulled his hands away from either side of the ’scope to free them up for a merry clap of victory. “Come here,” he called, his voice taking on the near-obscene vibrato of intense pleasure. “It’s as beautiful as I had hoped.”

  But the trek to the microscope, and the image, seemed suddenly complicated. For one thing, there were suddenly two of everything: two Dr. O’Haras, two battered stainless steel tables, two identical ’scopes. Though disorienting, it certainly had its implications for O’Hara’s work. He probably would benefit from having two selves—one to remain in the science world and one to flee fully into art.

  The whole room now shifted entirely out of focus, as if the whole space was under a giant ’scope, and O’Hara, miscalculating, turned a mammoth knob way too far. It took considerable effort to keep O’Hara in my vision—there was suddenly something indistinct about him. Much like Microaestheticism, which more and more seemed to me a theory only of specifics, lacking a fundamental to give those fine points relevance, O’Hara’s relationship to the space was suddenly unclear. Was he that form inches to my right? Or was he the faded blob still feet away? Groping, like all theories do in their infancy, I reached out for my bearings and apparently collided with the ’scope instead.

  “Damnit! I had it perfectly adjusted! Look, this space is just as sacred as any gallery. Same rules apply! Watch what you’re doing; don’t touch without permission,” O’Hara scolded. “This place may not be pretty but there’s serious stuff going on here. You can’t just grab at things willy-nilly.” O’Hara seemed unduly annoyed, as if he had been intuiting my increasing doubts about his theory and his credibility. Perhaps that’s why he elaborated so unnecessarily. “Think about it. What if you just reached out like that in a gallery and knocked over a sculpture?” Leaving me to think about what I had done, O’Hara went back to his adjustment ritual. The knobs turned
, a sound not unlike an arthritic joint complaining at having to move once more. Or perhaps that sound was O’Hara’s joints, the soft bone-on-bone groan of a body too often employed in the same tiny gestures. In the absence of any clear visuals, it was impossible to say which. But it was clear where the murmurs of complaint originated. O’Hara’s mutters, theatrically overblown to remind me of the grievous consequences of my conduct, ranged from snarled “damnits” to little whispers on how things had degenerated in the last minute. “Well, there goes the right quadrant,” he said, seeming to address the ’scope in their kindred agony over how out of whack everything had become. But as for O’Hara’s face and movements, they were left up to guesswork. The room remained as undefined as the moment of my transgression.

  “All right. It’s as fixed as it’s going to be. Believe me, it’s not nearly as good as it was before, but it’ll at least give you some indication of the quality of post-art-viewing blood.” I advanced toward the sound of O’Hara’s voice gingerly—I had a feeling bumping the ’scope a second time would be more than enough ground to end our contact. As I attempted to round the corner of the steel table to the viewing side, I felt O’Hara’s hand close around my upper arm. “Open your eyes, will you? You were about to bump the table.” O’Hara, one of the few of us blessed enough to believe that everything he does is eye opening, luxuriated in the dual meaning of his directive. “You know, Microaestheticism is all about opening your eyes. It’s about seeing life—and art—in a new and entirely synergistic way.”

  I stood in front of the ’scope, unable to decipher where it began or ended, or how far it was from my face. O’Hara, suddenly enthralled at what must be a new thought about his cherished theory, went on, oblivious to my hesitance. “In fact, I see the ’scope itself as a conduit to that new seeing. Unlike the gallery—with its white walls, its wine and cheese corner, its emptiness amplifying every insipid utterance—the ’scope is a quiet and private place.” He paused to let the profundity of that sink in. “And I like that you have to bend down and put your eye to an eyepiece to see a slide. That act … it’s like a literal—or rather—a literalized gesture—or act—of interpretation.” O’Hara, demonstrating the smug habit of rewording his own ideas merely to extend their expression, seemed in no hurry for me to begin this “act.” And all this talk about seeing was providing too obvious an irony in a room now so blurry.

  “You know, when you put your eye to the eyepiece, you actually bring your brain closer to the slide, you know, the art. Isn’t that neat? That’s really what you’re doing at the ’scope—getting that thinker right up tight to the art.” Merely to stop O’Hara from continuing down this line of thinking—a line that would no doubt lead to another manic epiphany about the implications of his Big Idea—I asserted my interest in finally seeing what all the fuss was about. “Well, by golly then, put your eye to the ’scope. You don’t need my invitation. That’s the thing about the ’scope. It, by its very mechanism, demands viewer participation. You have to crane down and look. You can’t just stroll through like you can in a gallery. Noooope …” I had a feeling this was meant as some sort of dig—as if O’Hara was implying I had been spoiled by the noncommittal ease of gallery going. Rather than argue with him—perhaps pointing out that a viewer’s level of engagement had nothing to do with a physical “craning” or lack thereof—I attempted to line up my eye socket with the eyepiece. It was best to let it go. O’Hara was obligated to criticize the art world; otherwise, how could he justify his intrusion? Like many theorists, O’Hara’s zeal was born of a belief that his idea was a long-overdue corrective. And anyone who was presumptuous enough to believe himself capable of remedying both art and science would hardly be distracted by the pinpricks of a single doubter’s logic.

  A man of science, such as O’Hara still would tout himself, could probably tell me that looking through the ’scope’s magnified lenses would not correct what had suddenly gone wrong with my vision. Still, once I finally situated my face on the eyepiece, I was startled to see nothing crisper than the general blur everything had become. I tried to tell O’Hara, but I suddenly was too short of breath to speak. Thankful for what he no doubt thought was a silence inviting commentary, O’Hara plowed forward with a fresh thought on his theory.

  “You know what would really be great? To have a slide with a viewer’s blood blown up right next to the picture he just saw. So, you have someone look at a Clyfford Still—let’s say that big black one. ‘Untitled’ something or other. Then, you look at his blood under the slide, take a magnified picture of it, blow it up, and tack it up right there next to the Still painting. I bet the blown-up blood would look like the Still painting, only more advanced. Like the next aesthetic step.” Gasping now, and doubled over in a barely repressed dry heave, I was forced merely to think my protests to this. O’Hara had a different reading of my response.

  “Whoa there!” O’Hara reached out, grabbed my arm, and turned me around to face him. “Hey now, calm down. I know it’s shocking to see that level of composition under a slide. Believe me, when I first placed a photo of blown-up intestinal flora next to a Gorky, I had about the same reaction. ’Bout had to breathe into a paper bag, to be frank.” It always baffled me when people announced frankness about matters that demanded neither openness nor caginess. Whether or not he needed a paper bag after epiphany #453—and whether or not he was up-front about that fact or kept it tucked away in euphemism—seemed wildly beside the point as I was overtaken by a new round of heaves. Perhaps, I thought, feeling another contraction of my gut in protest to something likely more potent than any insight I heard today—perhaps O’Hara’s thoughtless recasting of my physical trouble as awe at his idea indicated a larger paradox of great and small minds alike.

  There seem to me two types of artists and thinkers. There are those who work under a heavy mantle of self-skepticism, barely able to plow through their own doubt enough to clear any room for their creations. Then, there are those who seem not to acknowledge—or perhaps even sense—any doubts whatsoever. This style of mind sees everything in the world as support for its creations. Even contradictory evidence, detractors, a whole world shouting “this is not so” seem only further proof that the world needs them. Otherwise, why wouldn’t it already believe? Clearly, O’Hara was in the latter category: so romanced by his own thinking that even a totally unconnected phenomenon—such as a retching journalist—registered as a rising cheer for his theory. The problem is that it is hard to know which type of thinker to admire. At first, a skeptic’s wise tempering of his or her own insights seems nobler, as he or she is at least acknowledging all human fallibility. But then the realization hits: both the skeptic and the believer are equally solipsistic, as the extreme nature of both their doubts and convictions can be born of nothing less than a mind untethered by outside reality.

  Maybe this was why, even after sitting me down in a swiveling chair and rushing off to hunt down a paper bag, O’Hara hardly broke stride in his pontificating. “I have in my mind’s eye a new art,” O’Hara shouted from across the room, over the sounds of his own rifling. “Pigments in Petri dishes. Cells on canvas. Diseases exposed to art. Artists exposed to disease.” O’Hara had now returned, and he shook out a paper bag inches from my bowed head (bowed, that is, not in reverence of Microaestheticism, but to ward off a wave of nausea and dizziness). “There might be a bit of powder left in this bag, but don’t worry about it.” O’Hara then jammed the bag on my face, kindly leaving it up to me to decide whether to christen it as a hyperventilation bag or a vomit bag. Not wanting to inhale, ingest, or otherwise encounter any more substances of O’Hara’s, I brought up my arms and pushed it away, bringing on a new round of wheezing. “Suit yourself,” O’Hara huffed. “It was just filled with harmless spores.”

  Insensitive is surely too mild a term for someone who begins discussing the beauty of disease in the face of true physical agony. But it was the only term I had the energy to supply as O’Hara elucidated his meaning. “S
ee, you expose disease to art, and then check it under a ’scope. Is it more beautiful? Is it trying to outdo the art with its own composition of viruses, bacteria, or malignant cell overgrowth? I bet it is. Conversely, you could also look at the cells of ailing artists. How does the image of their disease size up to the average sufferers? The thing is …” Here, O’Hara lowered his tone, taking the manic lilt from his voice to show how admirably even-handed his consideration of these matters was. “I think we really need to answer these questions before we even consider treating disease with art or contracting disease for art’s sake.” How prudent of you! I badly wanted to quip, but it was a distant third on my list of present wants, after “to breathe” and “to see.”

  “Caught your breath yet?” O’Hara asked, in the offhand, rhetorical manner of someone asking if I was enjoying the weather of a perfect day. I opened my mouth to answer in the strenuous negative, but all that resulted was a series of hacking coughs followed by another ominous retch, this one ill-content to remain dry. As matter gurgled and rose up into my mouth, I covered my lips and forced it back down, where it rumbled, prophesizing another uprising. “You, my friend, need to be out of the vicinity of the ’scope when you erupt.” O’Hara seemed to pack another aimless insult in his use of the crude, unsympathetic “erupt” to describe a body’s natural revolt. He grabbed the back of my chair and rolled me to a corner, as if moving a piece of unneeded equipment out of the way. “I was not planning on this when I invited you here, you know. I’m not here to play school nurse.”

  Was it that reference to childhood, or something else, that suddenly prompted a montage of my growing up? Though seemingly still conscious, and still focused on the floor with my head bowed, and still slightly swiveling the swivel chair with every fought-down heave, I could suddenly see isolated images of my youth. I saw myself, four or five, finger-painting in a way not intended—delicately, using small parts of each finger for different colors, my fingernail employed as a crude spade to give the picture texture, and me, pausing for minutes at a time in contemplation of my next mark. I saw my art teacher, oblivious, leading me over to a classmate to show me how it’s really done … and this kid, without the slightest plan in his mind, rubbing his entire hand and forearm in each color and slopping the muddy mix on paper, sometimes ripping it, sometimes missing it, and all the while grinning in that it’s-damn-good-isn’t-it way. So much like O’Hara was that baseless confidence, that idiotic pride in his every expression.