Time goes by and the priest grows older, work and hope occupying his days. There is, he feels, something microscopic about his work. The house has been left to him entire and complete, but from the moment he decided to decline the invitation to sainthood and pass it on to the next priest, he started finding little cracks to fill in that apparent completeness, and even after all this time and everything he has done, he’s still finding them. Each addition and improvement defines a new characteristic (always in the form of an alternative, a choice among possibilities), enriching the figure of the priest who will come to open the gates of heaven for him and his predecessor with the golden keys of Charity.
For he has not lost sight of Charity. Quite the contrary: it is the center and motor of his striving, although he will not be the one to practice it, which grieves him deeply. In his visits to the areas where the poor people live, he must close his eyes to the wretchedness of a situation that he cannot remedy: he has come too soon. He consoles himself with the thought that it makes no difference whether action is taken now or a generation later: by their very nature, desperate situations of that kind tend to perpetuate themselves. And when he returns to the house and its grounds, to that splendor built in the name of Charity, he sees it transformed into the enormous good that his successor will be able to do.
Protected by hope, then, he continues with his work, and, as with the previous incumbent, his excursions become less frequent until one day they finally cease altogether. Age, he feels, is bringing him closer to the man who will come to fulfill the promise. Old now, he approaches the young man to whom he has devoted so much thought, whose reactions he has tried to anticipate, guessing his preferences for this or that color, for a style in furnishing, or a way of spending his evenings. At certain moments, in the fuddled ramblings of senility, he believes that his successor is there already, opening the door and walking in, wet from the rain and ruddy-cheeked from the cold, exhausted after a day spent in the shacks of the local people, comforting the sick, taking food and clothing to the destitute, supervising the building of a school. . The new priest wants to relax now, and for that he has his comfortable abode. . but perhaps what he needs to complete his satisfaction at that imagined moment is a pipe to smoke, a harmless indulgence for an active man. . but there’s not a pipe in the house! Emerging from his somnolence, the old priest orders a set of pipes, in various woods and meerschaum, with mother-of-pearl and carving, and revolving pipe racks, and a set of pipe tools. .
These increasingly minor and intimate additions occupy the final days of his life. When the new priest arrives, he admires the house and is horrified by the terrible poverty surrounding it, as if he were performing a ritual. Just as his predecessors anticipated, the contrast intensifies his determination to act, and he is about to start handing out milk and diapers for the babies, medicine for the sick, blankets and fuel for the rudimentary huts that offer scant protection from the winds of a harsh winter. If he delays, it is not for want of initiative, but because there is so much to do. There is so much poverty, he doesn’t know where to start: the urgent needs compete among one another fiercely. And this delay, though meant to be brief, is long enough for his intention to deviate. Prompted by a natural curiosity, he visits the house, the gardens, the tea pavilion, the deer park; he only has to live there for a day, or an hour, perhaps just a minute, to catch the echoes of a former future of which he is the incarnation, and he begins to understand what motivated the builders. The sacrifices they have made for him are sublime, and it seems mean to take advantage of them. . He will be followed by another, and he is inspired by the idea of working for that other because, as he gradually sees and understands everything that has been prepared for him, he notices all the things that could be perfected and added for the next priest. .
There is no need to pursue the series: it would take us too far, all the way to an eternity that has been lying in wait from the outset. Let’s just say that the successor to this third priest, and the one who takes over from the fourth, and all those who follow, decipher the message and accept the challenge. The house continues to be completed and beautified, in splendid isolation, an oasis of perfection in a desert-like world devastated by egotism and indifference. In its permanence, the house becomes a symbol of the virtuous soul, the divine soul, and its comforts are progressively refined by the unbroken chain of just men, the golden thread that runs through History, in the name of the redemption that Charity will bring.
AUGUST 1, 2010
Cecil Taylor
DAWN IN MANHATTAN. In the first, tentative light, a black prostitute is walking back to her room after a night’s work. Hair in a mess, bags under her eyes; the cold transfigures her drunkenness into a stunned lucidity, a crumpled isolation from the world. She didn’t venture beyond her usual neighborhood, so she only has to walk a few blocks. Her pace is slow; she could be going backward; at the slightest deviation, time could dissolve into space. What she really wants is sleep, but she’s not even conscious of that anymore. The streets are almost deserted; the few people who usually go out at this time (or have no indoors to go out of) know her by sight, so they don’t examine her violet high-heeled shoes, her tight skirt with its long split, or her eyes, which wouldn’t return their glassy or tender gazes anyway. It’s a narrow street, with a number for a name, and the buildings are old. Then there’s a stretch where they’re more modern, but in worse repair: stores, fire escapes dangling from sheer façades. Farther on, past the corner, is the place where she sleeps till late, in a rented room that she shares with two children, her brothers. But first, something happens: five or six guys who’ve been up all night have formed a semicircle on the sidewalk, in front of a store window. The woman wonders what they could be looking at that has turned them into figures from a snapshot. The group is absolutely still; not even the smoke of a cigarette is rising. She walks in their direction, watching them, and, as if they were a fixture to which she could attach the thread that is holding her up, her step becomes somewhat lighter. It takes her a few moments to understand what is going on. The men are in front of an abandoned store. Behind the dirty window, in the dimness, are dusty boxes and debris. But there is also a cat, and facing it, with its back to the window, a rat. Both animals are staring at each other without moving; the hunt has come to an end, and the quarry has nowhere to run. Sublimely unhurried, the cat tenses its every nerve. The spectators are not simply statues now but beings of stone: planets, the elemental cold of the universe. . The prostitute taps the window with her purse, the cat is distracted for a fraction of a second, and that is enough for the rat to escape. The men emerge from their reverie, look at the black accomplice with disgust; a drunk spits on her, two others follow her as she walks away. . before the darkness has vanished altogether, an act of violence will take place.
One story is followed by another. Vertigo. Retrospective vertigo. There’s an excess of continuity. Narrative traction cannot be suspended, even by inserting endings. Vertigo creates anxiety. Anxiety paralyzes. . and saves us from the danger that would justify vertigo: approaching the edge, for example the edge of the chasm that separates an ending from a continuation. Immobility is art in the artist, while all the events treated in the artwork take place on the other side of the glass. Night comes to an end, so does day: there’s something awkward about the work in progress. The opposite twilights drop like tokens into slots of ice. The eyes of statues closing when they open and opening when they close. Peace in war. And yet there’s a movement that’s out of control, and all too real; it makes others anxious and provides the model for our own anxieties. Art figures it as Endless Revolving Growth, and it gives rise to libraries, theaters, museums, and whole universes of fantasy. It may stop, but if it does, an enormous number of remnants are left. After a while, the remnants begin to revolve and breed. Multiplication multiplies itself. . But, as we know, there is only “the one life.” From which it follows that an artist’s biography is hard to distinguish from the trials of its writing: it’s not simply a matter of representing representation (anyone could do that) but of creating unbearable situations in thought. That’s why biographies are usually so long: nothing is ever enough to appease the mobile impulses of immobility. The stories try desperately to coalesce, they wrap themselves in pearly teleological scruples, the wind ignites them, they fall into the void. . But maybe no one cares.