Page 51 - Demo

The Agony and the Ecstasy, Depths of Glory. He filled I liked to watch him work. He showed that the things his bookshelves with books about art and artists. out the window—the garage with its black peaked
I visited him in his room. I’d run past the mahogany table in the dining room and the white cabinets to the ceiling in the kitchen and he’d let me in. If he was listening to music, he’d take off the headphones and jazz came through the speakers, mostly Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker. If he’d been reading, he’d put aside the book or, if it were poetry, he’d read me a poem then show me how it worked and what it meant. He loved Keats and Stevens.
roof and rose bushes climbing up its dirty green shingles, the brown telephone poles in the alley with wires sagging between their crossbars, the shirts, pants, underwear flapping on the neighbor’s clothes line—simple, everyday things, were beautiful and full of rightness and meaning. Without him I wouldn’t have seen beauty in ordinary things. I’d have been like my parents, half-dead, waiting for the other half to die.
He said that seeing beauty was a way of knowing.
There was plenty of beauty in Chicago, if you kept
your eye out for it. Drawing and painting helped you
see the beauty around you. He said he wanted to go
beyond the apparent ordinary to reveal the essences “I don’t get it. Why is that so great?” of things. Beauty revealed that essence and gave you
a vision of reality. I thought I could see how his paint- ings disclosed what an apple or a hammer or a pair of shoes really were. Beauty, he said, was as eternal as numbers and geometry. It was the touch of the eter- nal. Form and harmony endure. He said he wanted
He showed how the apples seem to be falling from top left to bottom right, how the straight black bottle aided that view, how the blue in the table cloth rhymed with the blue of the back wall. In traditional still life fruit was stationery, was still, these apples were alive. He went to other paintings. He showed me how red tulips were actively reaching, stretching themselves upward, how in view of Sainte-Victoire Cezanne creates a sense of depth and distance with- out using perspective. I loved how he talked about Cezanne.
to show how beauty redeems the ordinary. Yes, he talked like that. And he made it clear that he meant beautiful, not merely pretty or picturesque. Tintoret- to’s Crucifixion at San Rocco, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Vermeer’s View of Delft were beautiful, not merely pretty. He disliked abstract painting. Leave the figurative world and all you have is an empty sublime or pretty patterns. Next to his striving, the rest of my world seemed insignificant and boring. Watching him work, I didn’t know what absorbed me more, seeing the painting or drawing take shape out of nowhere or seeing how intensely he went at it. I felt that whatever I did when I grew up, I wanted to do it with the same passion he gave to his painting.
Another time he said, “You’re in high school. What year?”
One time when I came into his room he was in his armchair looking at a book about Cezanne. I stood next to him and he showed me a painting of a basket of apples. “How did he do it?” he said. “How?”
“Sophomore.”
“Are you going to college?” Before I could say any- thing, he said, “Go to college. Go to college. And don’t be like me. Stay the whole four years and graduate.”
He had dropped out. His father had died and he had had to help his mother. Burning with curiosity, want- ing adventure, he couldn’t wait to start living.
“Take it from me, kid, you can wait. Life will get you soon enough.”
Sometimes he looked at me as if he wanted to tell me something, something about what he had learned, something about how to live, what to do. Other times he looked as if we would both be better off some- where else.
One Saturday after lunch I went over there. Aunt Mil-
lie answered the door.
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