ASIM issue 55 by ed. Jacob Edwards

Author:ed. Jacob Edwards [Edwards, ed. Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Andromeda Spaceways Publishing Co-op

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EVENT:

It has been four days since she left.

I have not been to my studio. I cannot explain this inertia. I sit at her small table, watching the snow flurry without, watching the lake contract to a blind eye, staring white at the grey expanse above. Though I have no physical need to eat, this fleshy form has grown into its habits, and I drag myself to the kitchen to find sustenance. This is a most lonely endeavour.

I am forced to turn on lights.

In their hard incandescence I am confronted by my own visions. In the intervening months, some of my works have made their way into our home—her favourites, as she has had her pick from my studio before the gallery man takes the lion’s share to sell. It has given me pleasure to see her smile, or ponder, or sigh, and sometimes I have seen a tear glisten in her eye. In this harsh, artificial light the paintings look gaudy, inane, macabre. They do not speak to me, their creator, as they speak to some. Art is something I do, not something I understand. I do not know why my forgotten masters gave me this talent, this power, to reduce a rational person to a fool blathering over arcs of colour.

These images, fragments of nothing, are pale reflections of other people’s lives. I now understand that those who see them invest them with meaning, and this gives them value. I wonder what it is about the painting hanging here in the kitchen that catches her attention. Nothing in the data I have gathered to date can account for why this ring of white, fringing arctic blue and fading to blackened spikes in the centre like some vast gaping maw, should cause her to stare into its depths with such wonder, such horror. They are, after all, no more than reflections of colour, waves of light, frequencies measured and interpreted by the eye so that a primordial inner being might know whether to fight, flee, or feed.

It is in this moment of reflection, staring through that white-rimmed eye into the glazed dark beyond, that I realise my mistake. I have struggled to quantify that which can only be qualified. I have sought to build statistical data sets and to extrapolate conclusions from the numbers gathered therein, but it is not the numbers that matter. It is the tightness in the chest, the prickle in the eye, the creeping sense of dread; these things which cannot be measured or counted, at least not by me, not by the machine that drives me. These are a primitive people. They should not be judged by complex methods, but primitive ones.

I may not yet understand, but I grasp how I might understand.

I contemplate the dreadful, the unforgiveable.

Were I home, I would have the means to take this step safely. I could archive a copy of this version of myself so that, should the worst happen, I could return to this last safe moment and restore my being.

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