Daniel Atijas replied that he liked that image of cataclysm in which, if he had understood me correctly, the wellspring of the new world order would morph into an underground river, but he doubted that such changes could take place over a short period of time. We were sitting on the terrace by his room, looking out into the night. And besides, what we know, he said, we know only in part; something always eludes us — the impact of a detail or the meaning of the whole, whatever — there is always something missing, and as the years went by, he said, he was more and more inclined to think that the image of Sisyphus pushing that boulder to the top of the hill in vain was the most apt way to show the pointlessness of human existence. What could I say? I told him I was a painter, not a philosopher, and that I saw the world as a delicate play of color and volume, and that I further believed that each of us was seeking something that would allow full appreciation of this give-and-take and thereby, ultimately, an understanding of the world. I fell silent, waiting for him to ask me the inevitable question, and when he finally did ask what I was after, I did not hesitate.
I said: Love. He turned slowly to look at me. Now there is a pointless search, he said, for if there is something that does not exist, it is love. I asked him how he knew, barely able to stop myself from reaching out and laying my hand on his arm, pale in the darkness of the night. That is what the books say, he said, though he didn’t have, he said, any particular book in mind, but in most books — he believed that all books were written for love — we were trying to reach love through writing, and if there really were such a thing as love, he said, there would be no need to write, there would be no books. We live, he said, in a world that cobbles together or pushes us to cobble together what it is that we are missing, and once we succeed, he said, the world sweeps it away in a flash just so we’ll take on yet again the futile effort of retrieving our paradise lost. I was not sure I had understood him, nor was I sure that being understood even mattered to him. He struck me as the type who makes more promises than he keeps, though I thought right away that this was not because of him but because of what other people were thinking or expecting and that he was not necessarily betraying himself but them and their expectations, for which he, of course, could in no way be responsible. I thought of this later, when, after leaving his room, I decided to go to my studio rather than back to my room. The night was dark, and the squinting lamps along the path that led among the studios did not provide much safety. I didn’t know what elks do at night, but I hoped that none was sleeping in the middle of the path. Once in my studio, I switched on all the lights, spread out my many attempts at capturing the shape of the face, and compared them for a long time, adding a new line here and there, a little shading, a curve, or a blank space.
I couldn’t imagine how Daniel Atijas would react were he to see all the sketches, but I knew I could show them to him only if I were satisfied with what I was after. He had expressed a desire several times to see what I was up to, for he could not, he said, imagine me painting, the very image eluded him, and whenever he thought he might be on the right track, I’d say something, he said, that would show him he was way off. It eluded me, too, I said, but I promised him right away that one day I would definitely show him the paintings I was working on, though there weren’t as many of them as there were sketches of his face, which pushed me to again postpone displaying them and promise myself that I would give more time to the paintings, or at least to my preparations. I had come to Banff with ideas about big formats, and I would be able to start and finish them only once I had set down, in my mind and on paper, every detail. And so I sat and pored over my stabs at capturing the shape of the face I had always been carrying inside me and imagined myself working on something entirely different, something that would free, not enslave, me, as I had been enslaved, no doubt, by the rash statement I had made that evening that love was what I was after in order to grasp the system of the world. Love, of course, is not received; love is given; only a person who is able to give love has the right to get it; he who is only seeking it while giving nothing of himself to others has nothing good to hope for. I had failed to say all this to Daniel Atijas, and it was too late to remedy the situation: midnight was long since past.
I was fidgeting in my studio, indecisive and anxious, surrounded by drawings and sketches, and not a single trustworthy word came to mind. Later I recalled a little gesture of his, the tip of his index finger running along the curve of his eyebrow, and that helped me feel more confident, though I still kept opening my mouth like a fish. Anyone seeing me would have thought I was yawning. My jaws hurt so badly from doing this that in the end I had to take two aspirins and lie down on the little sofa under the window. Here I fell asleep and had a funny dream in which the president of the Banff Centre was giving a long-winded explanation about how a space that is too cramped and a space that is too expansive can both shape a person’s souclass="underline" the first imposes constraints, so he feels limited and uninterested in pain, whereas the second disperses him, thereby stripping him of his true sense of proportion and all support. And a soul with no support, said the president of the Banff Centre in my dream, is condemned forever to free-fall. Meanwhile he kept brushing the dandruff from his shoulders, then clapping his hands, and the dandruff would waft haze-like into the air. Lucky thing, I thought, that I am not dreaming about his wife, and I woke. I picked up a pencil and added a few lines to two sketches of the face. If my calculations were correct, Daniel Atijas would be leaving in seven days. One always counts the days and skips the nights, I thought; I’d have felt better saying: Daniel Atijas is leaving in seven days and six nights. That would have come out sounding like more, longer, though ultimately his stay would end no matter what, and the nights could change nothing as far as that was concerned, whether they were counted or not.
Night did not exist for Daniel Atijas. He was, he said, a daytime person; for him night was only a lead-up to day, a time to wait for light, because without light, at least for him, he said, he couldn’t accomplish a thing; he couldn’t even think, let alone write, and so he always wrote during the day, in early morning or early evening, hence at a time, he said, when the light was gathering or slowly dispersing and when contrasts became, first, in the morning, sharper and sharper and then, at twilight, less and less so. If it were up to him to use a single word to qualify his prose, he said, though he really hoped no one would ever ask him to, but if they did, he said, if someone asked for one word to capture his prose, then the word would be: “cross-fading.” That did not, of course, he said, mean an ordinary shift from one form to another, and he certainly was not thinking, for instance, of Escher’s geometric metamorphoses, or a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, or even Dalí’s surrealist landscapes, but of that essentially inexplicable shift from idea to thought and then to the spoken and written word, of the very moment when nothing becomes something, flying in the face, he said, of all natural laws. With that, he said, he associated dawn and dusk, times of tender renewal and subtle separation, when the darkness turns into particles of light and then light turns into dark dough. We talked about that on a day when we went off for a walk along the river to have a look at unusual rock formations along the riverbank. For us these are only geological forms, I said to Daniel Atijas, but for the Native Americans they are giants who come alive at night and heave boulders at the people who, whether by chance or intent, have gone wandering among them.