Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

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www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 upright position. I lifted his hand and it was a heavy stone, which dropped like a paperweight back to his horizontal side. I woke up to see Manet’s Olympia on my wall. I prayed to her. Give me back my hope, Olympia, soften my injuries. But she only said in reply, “Death, Morir,” My trip to Houston resulted in seeing Olympia's estranged godlessness through the eyes of Cy Twombly. She became for me nothing more than a fortune-teller’s scribbles on canvas. I know that my dad will likely die from his cancer. I’m waiting for it. My mom is waiting, even my grandmother. We wait in sustained lament. I also wait for my lover. I keep texting him back. My words drop into an abyss. The names I write to him aren't nice, but at least I mean no harm, I only mean to tease him. I call him dirty girl-names like "cunt,” “bitch-slut,” "knife-wound." But he ignores these messages. He writes back asking if I’d like him to bring a dildo to strap on and fuck him with. I don’t know if he’s serious or not. He’s probably been with someone else all of this time that I’ve spent waiting, maybe even a boyfriend. He’d take anyone who he could practice a different set of scripted lines on. He needs an audience, I guess. Then he’ll come to me with what's left. Who knows whom his other lover is. It could be my neighbor, my boss, my best friend. It’s been almost two years now. And still, it feels as if we've only just begun. These have been confusing years for my parents who keep asking about my love life. They want me to tell them if I have boyfriend or not, if I’ve been dating. It seems that now more than ever, my dad wants to know that maybe I'll have children someday. In part I think its because he’s afraid I might not. In part it is also because he’s begun to die. I don’t quite know if he believes he’ll survive the cancer. It is an uncommon form of melanoma in the sinuses and there have only been about one hundred similar recorded cases in all of medical history. I know his wish for me is to ensure that he lives on, in me. And all of the while, underneath my adamant abstinence from any portrayal or depiction of courtship to ease my parent’s minds, there was this: Seth and me and our little rendezvous. Perhaps the times we meet are less real to me than those other parts of my life like my job and my family because there is no proof of him except for his tie. The secrecy of it makes it more like a dream and certainly the state of mind I'm in when he rolls around makes it less real to me due to sleep-loss. I feel like the hours we spend together are exiled from my other hours. They are hours imprisoned by his determination to exclude me from his regular life and confine me to those few hours before the break of day, or just after dawn. There is another Olympia painting I know of, painted by Jean Michel Basquiat. His Olympia is less discreet than Cy Twombly’s, if there could be such a thing. He explores the filth that Manet didn’t even know he had kept intact. The painting is called Three quarters of Olympia Minus the Slave and I saw it in New York City during my first year in college. As if my father’s trips to museums hadn’t been ample introduction, I decided to study painting. As Basquiat’s title suggests, there is no black servant in the painting. Basquiat’s whore is a man. It is a transvestite who touts an almost-etched coat of arms above his head. There are almost-hands painted in completion but they are disassembled lines. There is no black servant. Perhaps it is supposed to be the vision of the room seen from the black-servant’s perspective, a parody of Manet. There are no flowers. There is not a pose. There is just an ugly piece of art that contrasts stunningly with Manet's pretty little thing. The rich, white courtesan is dismantled in Basquiat's depiction. She is long forgotten. There are mismatched eyebrows. There is no head of hair. An inscription reads, "Woman dry her neck by Edgar ©." The French word, “Absinthe,” is only almost legible. It is painted over in big scouring gestures of white paint. There is red paint, too. There is blue paint, too. It looks like some kind of bitten thumb aimed at the French. Vol. II. Issue. III 272 September 2011
www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 The abjection, the casting away of Manet and his Olympia, is like the gesture that Manet wanted to make but couldn't because he was first and foremost a Frenchman. But Haiti was the country where some of Basquiat's ancestors lay dead, a country ruthlessly fucked by the French. There is no grace in Basquiat, only big ugly gestures to make a scene, a vivid piece of art that nearly mimics refuse. If this refuse is where Olympia landed after she was pillaged by the future, there is nothing but a disassembled mess and squiggly lines. There is a face with a row of teeth and mismatched eyes. This is Olympia, this man is Olympia, this bald-white-sketch-of-a-man is a French-like thing. There is no culture to feign, any longer. There is just a brash gesture to aim at the long, lingering past like a missile. Launching missiles to cover the past in paint gestures, not kidding. Not struggling under the heavy-handed dissipation of arms that forces nations into secret retire. There is no bureaucracy in Basquiat. There is just a handy gesture dragged over the surface with fucked-up concentration. There is no black servant. There is no over-arching adherence to aesthetic wit. His wit is defiantly ugly, blocking out the pretty whores that run rampant all across the other canvasses. There is nothing to incite desire or lust. This canvas incites a wideeyed laughter. This art is a funny thing, fucking with the past. At 6:45am Seth sends a text that says, "Here." I go down to open the gate for him, down the three levels of stairs that lead to my bedroom. He is on his bike. He has a bottle of wine and he's smiling. Sort of. He says he's been riding his bike all night. He says he came from a strange party. He acts very self-important. "You're strange," I say. "You're strange, too," he replies. For a second, his eyes are a blank stare. I only notice because I've been haunted by a blank stare. Eyes, cheeks, the fragile skin below the eye, the skin draping cheeks, jaw, stretching over a chin. The eyes are calm, too calm, too distant, vacant. This is the face I have been anticipating. This is the face that will be the look of death on my father, soon. I look into windows and see this face, in the eyes of a cat or a child, faces so plain their eyes merge with the background, pinned to the backdrop, unchanging. When I look into the mirror and this face appears performing a trick of the eye. It is a moving face, an animation staring back at me, but it’s not me. The disconnection of his blank stare from my thoughts makes my mind go blank. That face and my thoughts stand in utter separation. No trail of thought could be salvaged from the tiny electric currents that go quiet when it is before me. And now I see it in Seth’s eyes. One day I visited home and my father walked beside me. I tried to say something to him as we walked, anything, but the blank stare that I could see in his eyes kept me in a state of stupor. I could not pick up on any of the threads that were woven with our superficial hellos. We had no news to explain, or I had no way of explaining it. I had not seen him for months. We went to lunch and before we ordered I stepped into the bathroom. The mirror looked at me from across the room. It kept my memory concealed, buried into a tight, flat corridor behind that head of hair in the reflection. I faced my reflection and she blinked again. She reached for me, feeling the mirror, searching for a way out, a way to reach through the borderline, to me. Her finger pointed at my left eye and it turned, touching my own finger and our fingers locked together in symmetry like the wings of a butterfly. I put my hand down, but hers remained, scratching at me, sucking me in, and I coughed. I ran out of the bathroom and looked at my father with wide eyes. I gave him my blank stare, my death wish. He has it still, knowing he'll die soon. I take Seth upstairs. Ever since I cut my hair, we have the same hair-do. Upstairs, in my bedroom, he sits. He begins to open a bottle of wine. Vol. II. Issue. III 273 September 2011
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