Mr. Ludd, involved in his spumoni, only nodded pleasantly. He refused to be bewildered by anything he heard or make protests or try to understand why things never worked out the way he planned. If people wanted him to do one thing he’d do it. If they wanted him to do something else he’d do that. No questions asked. La vida, as Delia Hunt also observed, es un sueño.
Later, walking back to 16th Street, his father said, “You know what you should do, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Use some of that money they gave you and get somebody really smart to write the thing for you.”
“Can’t. They got computers that can tell if you do that.”
“They do?” Mr. Ludd sighed.
A couple blocks farther on he asked to borrow ten dollars for some Fadeout. It was a traditional part of their reunions and traditionally Birdie would have said no, but having just been bragging about his stipend? He had to.
“I hope you’re able to be a better father than I’ve been,” Mr. Ludd said, putting the folded-up bill into his card-carrier.
“Yeah. Well, I hope so, too.”
They both got a chuckle out of that.
Next morning, following the single piece of advice he’d been able to get out of the advisor he’d paid twenty-five dollars for, Birdie made his first solo visit (years ago he’d been marched through the uptown branch with a few dozen other fourth graders) to the National Library. The Nassau branch was housed in an old wrapped-glass building a little to the west of the central Wall Street area. The place was a honeycomb of research booths, except for the top floor, 28, which was given over to the cables connecting Nassau to the uptown branch and then, by relays, to every other major library outside of France, Japan, and South America. A page who couldn’t have been much older than Birdie showed him how to use the dial-and-punch system. When the page was gone Birdie stared glumly at the blank viewing screen. The only thought in his head was how he’d like to smash in the screen with his fist: dial and punch!
After a hot lunch in the basement of the library he felt better. He recalled Socrates waving his arms in the air and the blind girl’s essay on philosophy. He put out a call for the five best books on Socrates written at a senior high school level and began reading from them at random.
Later that night Birdie finished reading the chapter in Plato’s Republic that contains the famous parable of the cave. Dazedly, dazzled, he wandered through the varied brightness of Wall Street’s third shift. Even after twelve o’clock the streets and plazas were teeming. He wound up in a corridor full of vending machines, sipping a hot Koffee, staring at the faces around him, wondering did any of them—the woman glued to the Times, the old messengers chattering—suspect the truth? Or were they, like the poor prisoners in the cave, turned to the rockface, watching shadows, never imagining that somewhere outside there was a sun, a sky, a whole world of crushing beauty?
He’d never understood before about beauty—that it was more than a breeze coming in through the window or the curve of Milly’s breasts. It wasn’t a matter of how he, Birdie Ludd, felt or what he wanted. It was there inside of things, glowing. Even the dumb vending machines. Even the blind faces.
He remembered the vote of the Athenian Senate to put Socrates to death. Corrupting the youth, ha! He hated the Athenian Senate but it was a different sort of hate from the kind he was used to. He hated them for a reason: Justice!
Beauty. Justice. Truth. Love, too, probably. Somewhere there was an explanation for everything. A meaning. It all made sense. It wasn’t just a lot of words.
He went outside. New emotions kept passing over him faster than he could take account of them, like huge speeded-up clouds. One moment, looking at his face reflected in the darkened window of a specialty food shop, he wanted to laugh out loud. The next moment, remembering the young prostitute in the room downstairs from where he lived now, lying on her shabby bed in a peekaboo dress, he wanted to cry. It seemed to Birdie that he could see the pain and hopelessness of her whole life as clearly as if her past and future were a physical object in front of him, a statue in the park.
He stood alone beside the sea railing in Battery Park. Dark waves lapped at the concrete shore. Signal lights blinked on and off, red and green, white and white, as they moved past the stars toward Central Park.
Beauty? The idea seemed too slight now. Something beyond beauty was involved in all of this. Something that chilled him in ways he couldn’t explain. And yet he was exhilarated, too. His newly awakened soul battled against letting this feeling, this principle, slip away from him unnamed. Each time, just as he thought he had it, it eluded him. Finally, towards dawn, he went home, temporarily defeated.
Just as he was climbing the stairs to his own room, a guerilla, out of uniform but still recognizably a guerilla, with stars and stripes tattooed across his forehead, came out of Frances Schaap’s room. Birdie felt a brief impulse of hatred for him, followed by a wave of compassion for the girl. But tonight he didn’t have the time to try and help her, assuming she wanted his help.
He slept fitfully, like a dead body sinking into the water and floating up to the surface. At noon he woke from a dream that stopped just short of being a nightmare. He’d been inside a room with a beamed ceiling. Two ropes hung from the beams. He stood between them, trying to grasp one or the other, but just as he thought he had caught hold of a rope, it would swing away wildly, like a berserk pendulum.
He knew what the dream meant. The ropes were a test of his creativeness. That was the principle he’d tried to define last night standing by the water. Creativeness was the key to all his problems. If he would only learn about it, analyze it, he’d be able to solve his problems.
The idea was still hazy in his mind but he knew he was on the right track. he made some cultured eggs and a cup of Koffee for breakfast, then went straight to his booth at the library to study. The tremendous excitement of last night had leaked out of things. Buildings were just buildings. People seemed to move a little faster than usual, but that was all. Even so, he felt terrific. In his whole life he’d never felt as good as he did today. He was free. Or was it something else? One thing he knew for sure: nothing in the past was worth shit, but the future, Ah! the future was blazing with promise.
4
From:
PROBLEMS OF CREATIVENESS
By Berthold Anthony Ludd
Summary
From ancient times to today we have seen that there is more than one criteria by which the critic analyzes the products of Creativeness. Can we know which of these measures to use? Shall we deal directly with the subject? Or indirectly.
There is another source to study Creativeness in the great drama of the philosopher Wolfgang Gothe, called “The Faust.” No one can deny this the undisputed literary pinnacle of “Masterpiece.” Yet what motivation can have drawn him to describe Heaven and Hell in this strange way? Who is the Faust if not ourselves. Does this not show a genuine need to achieve communication? Our only answer can be yes.
Thus once more we are led to the problem of Creativeness. All beauty has three conditions: 1, The subject shall be of literary format. 2, All parts are contained within the whole. And 3, The meaning is radiantly clear. True Creativeness is only present when it can be observed in the work of art. This too is the Philosophy of Aristotle that is valid for today.