“The creative process and the role of accident,” Armand announces, pausing to allow the audience to take down the rather lengthy statement and title of the evening’s lecture.
“Once again, I have asked the computes people to assist me. Lights, please.”
The large-scale computer screen projection shows up on the screen above the chalkboard, barely visible, dark grey on almost black.
“A series of randomized points-random as to location, random as to color-is given a certain amount of time to appear on the screen, mirror imaged four ways, in four quadrants touching at the center of the screen.
“The resultant image, a not very exciting series of symmetrical dots-you see it there, ho-hum and like that-appears, there is a momentary pause as this image is captured by the program, and the screen goes blank.
“We next see this image being dragged across the screen diagonally one way, forming an elaborately striped multi-colored ribbon-“And here we see it coming down the opposite way to form a sort of X shape.
“But watch, just watch what happens where they converge!”
Appreciative oohing and aahing from the audience.
“Here we see a design, intricate, elaborate, worthy of the centerpiece of the finest Persian rug!”
“Let’s isolate that image-”
And the excess of the diagonals is removed from the diamond shape of the design at the center of the screen.
“-and there you see it, ladies and gentlemen, a design which was not planned, which could not be predicted, the output of a controlled accident.
“Lights, please.”
“Now, I could have belabored the point, causing further exclamations of surprise and delight, by causing the screen to fill with the unique, decorative pattern, a sort of gift wrap effect.
“Or I could have made it into a frame, then put words of wisdom within, creating a sort of computerized needlepoint.
“But the point is, we have just seen an example of the use of accident in the creative process.
“And so it is, in all artistic creation! “Let us, however, define this particular accident.
“Aristotle tells us that to define a thing means to say to what class of things it belongs and then to say how it differs from the others of its class-a refining process which, pursued ad infinitum, would lead us from the universe to the smallest atom thereof.
“I submit to you that we define as accident the effect upon ourselves of the difference between what we had envisioned and what in point of fact eventuated from our creative efforts.
“In the example shown-for example-we did not know what specific design would result, but we knew, generally speaking, how it was formзd, what its overall size and configuration would be, how long it would take for the computer to create it, and so on.
“So that the accident exists in here.”
And~ he taps his forehead.
“The accident lies in Our wonder and astonishment at the beauty of that which we have created! “The computer wiz who programmed the thing was no less impressed than were you, ladies and gentlemen.
“There was no accident in the means or the medium! “The computer is what is is, the program, the display screen, the internal circuitry are what they are, following the rules of electronics, the rules of the program-all the rules that apply physically, without error.
“Indeed, the only accident possible to the process itself would consist of electro-mechanical failure, which did not occur.
“But. That specific design was not planned, not predictable, was, with respect to its creator-meaning, specifically, the guy who ran the program-and to you as well, an accident.
“On a very trivial scale, we could say that the unimaginable has occurred.
“We could no more predict that pattern and its effect upon us than we can next week’s lottery numbers.
“Accident.
“If the motivation of the creative process is informed inquiry, then whenever the answer is different from that we anticipated, we rightly call that an accident, one of the major thrills-and quite often major disappointments-in the creative process.
“It is a thrill if the accident is aesthetically pleasing or acceptable, a disappointment if it is not.
“So that it takes a certain courage to…
Yeah, right, Armand, it takes a certain courage to do what she is doing, Jessica, watching him, tells herself.
It takes a certain courage to hang in there while he does nothing for her, given that he could do it all for her, could make it all happen for her.
She has imagination-a great imagination!
And all the elements of reality are present for her to create her masterpiece of manipulation.
But it’s not happening.
The book is untouchable, the painting nonextant.
Which leaves her-where?
Which leaves her, essentially, the plaything of a great man.
Yes, she could sleep with him. Yes, she could have his telephone number. But no, she cannot be involved in any way with the book, and about the sacred activity itself, she dare not even ask.
It will come when it comes, in due course, she tells herself. She has to believe that it is there within him, bubbling, boiling, building pressure.
So that; sooner or later-and probably sooner rather than later-it will erupt.
Armand will explode in a spate of release of pent-up creativity.
What’s wrong with a fourth series of explorations of the feminine mystique-her feminine mystique will do quite nicely, thank you?
So what if there have been three of these already?
Is the world grown tired of Christmas?
How many years have those same tired Charlie Brown specials run on TV?
In the movies, what is the Friday the Thirteenth series up to now?
She could go on and on, for heaven’s sake!
So yes, Armand, you can damn well do yet another series of paintings based on the woman you’re currently sleeping with, who just happens to be Jessica.
All night, she stayed with him, slept with him.
Except that there was not all that much sleep involved.
He could not seem to get enough of her.
He was like some twenty year old in his prime and in love-even though she knows that he loves only his inner muse, the spark of his creativity.
He made a meal of her ass hole, of her ass.
He fucked her in the ass, in the mouth, in the cunt, what seemed to her like over and over, practically non-stop.
Because when he wasn’t fucking, he was building up to it, devouring her with eye and hand and mouth, turning her this way and that, tasting her, exploring her.
And okay, he flopped her around like she was a rag doll, treating her like a piece of meat. And okay, she can even accept that his enthusiasm was for his own sexuality rather than for herself, perhaps even a macho thing-except that, in her experience, macho was customarily reserved by men for when there were other men around.
But whatever, the fact of the matter is that he was persistent and potent-in other words, a real stud.
A real stud, Armand, that’s you, she tells him in her mind, looking down there, where he is driving home point after point to his audience, now become practically disciples, some of them, she would guess.
And only after she left him that morning, he on his way to the gym-to which, he assured her, Steve had not yet returned-only when she was once again by herself, on her way back to class, did she realize what he was doing.
Of course he was a fucking stud!
He was a stud because, at the moment, he couldn’t be anything else!
His creativity was, is blocked, and so that was all he was capable of doing, his only means of expressing himself, faute de mieux, for want of something better.
He was Patton between wars, Alexander the Great between campaigns-a ball of energy put on hold and periodically discharging all that excess power by other means.
She was going to inspire him? Bullshit!
If anything, she was in the way, providing him cathexis and thus delaying the crisis which would cause him to erupt, volcano-like, in tremendous creativity.
No, no, she tells herself; that’s giving her way too much credit. She is arbitrary in his life, is incidental to it, is merely something to help pass the time, nothing more.
In time, he could grow to depend upon her-but if he did, it would be as a part of his private life, or even all of it.
For whatever that’s worth, she appends.
Because Armand’s private life means virtually nothing to him. One look at his living conditions is sufficient to prove that.
The man has no private life!
Even his most significant sexual activity-she cannot believe that what they do when alone really means all that much to him-takes place, as it were, in performance.
Because Armand is no novice to group sex; she could tell by what happened over at Steve’s, at Armand’s instigation and virtual insistence.
So that even his sex life is public, in the sense that he brings his full image to bed with him in a bed not his own, whether that of Steve, of his agent (Jessica has seen but never met her), or of some wealthy patroness of the arts.
And she? What is she to him, then?
His groupie, is what.
Yes, she is nothing more to him than the representative of all those ditsy douchebags who ooh and aah at the sight of him.
Not that he is all that hard to look at; but neither is he a matine idol.
Or perhaps it is his greatness of soul which causes his admirers to stop and stare, as though he radiates some aura, some perpetual glow of creativity, a sort of incarnation of the prime creator, and not very far removed from the original at that.
Am I lucky or unlucky? Jessica asks herself, chiding herself for asking, for admitting to herself that, at this stage of the game (Her game? His?), she has come to depend on luck.
But what the hell, why not? she reasons.
Irene depended on it, as, no doubt, did Darlene, to a lesser degree.
Hell, she reminds herself, Irene didn’t even depend on it; it was something that simply happened to her, unbooked for and almost certainly, initially, at least, unappreciated, unrecognized for what it was, the chance of a lifetime.
Certainly, the melancholy figure of ‘Irene I’ didn’t have a fucking clue.
“… with the same surprise and delight as any of you, ladies and gentlemen! “And I beg of you not to look upon this as false modesty or ill-disguised braggadocchio, but rather as a confession of genuine humility in the face of that over which, frankly, I had no appreciable control.
“To project a mood and then to find in that projection a feedback far stronger than the input-well, you might think such an experience affords a deep inner satisfaction, but it doesn’t.
“Rather, there is an uneasiness, a frantic reaching back, of trying to remember in intimate detail, step by step, the process whereby the far-greater-than intended work was created.
“Not what did I do wrong, but rather, what did I do that was so absolutely correct that I can’t even remember doing it? “Frustrating as hell, let me tell you; and yet, it happens, happens all the time, happens when I least expect it, every bit as much a mystery to me as to the least informed viewer.”
Poor baby, Jessica says, silently, sarcastically, The stuff just pours out of you, doesn’t it, you fucking pig?
And yet, the audience is eating it all up, can hardly wait, some of them, to rush home, set up their easels and start causing all those happy accidents.
How about when you clean out my snatch with your tongue, Armand? How about when you sucked Steve’s jism outta my snatch? Jessica thinks. Were those accidents?
Did they come as a surprise to you? Were you shocked and disgusted, Armand, or was it just me?
If ever there was a case of fire and ice, of contrivance and manipulation in the service of his passion, Armand has to be the prime example.
And as in his sex life, so in his art, she is certain.
Of course, there is the matter of his inner muse.
Can it be that there yet resides within him that spark of innocence, that which allows itself to be informed and amazed by the world?
Certainly, with Steve, his actions were those of a boy, and not a very mature boy at that; still, what makes her think that boys are ever truly innocent, are na ye in those matter which must, surely, have preoccupied them from a very early age?
So that the fire may well be there, but so is the ice, so is that which looks on coldly, which calculates and manipulates.
And which, no doubt, manipulates her as well.
Not that she doesn’t deserve such treatment, she tells herself; after all, she did come to him.
But how could it have been otherwise?
He was, is the great artist and she was, is, the zero, the nobody, drawn to him impurely, drawn to him, not by his greatness but by his track record of side effects.
He did not set out to make either Irene or Darlene famous or rich; rather, their fame and fortune are side effects, fall-out, by-products, waste products, even, of his artistic effort.
Which, she reminds herself, is presently on hold, in abeyance, paused, in recess, inactivated-and possibly quite dead.
Ever think of that, cookie? she asks herself. That nasty little thought ever cross your conniving, angle-shooting mind?
What guarantee does she have that Armand will ever paint again?
Might help if the man owned a brush or some tubes of paint, or a sketch pad not yet filled with rather disappointingly crude studies (she knows; she has looked at them) for paintings already done, sold, gone forever, ancient history.
But the fact is, Armand is out of business.
He has, in essence, taken the money and run.
And is his continuing to hang onto the loft, to live there, his implicit commitment to a resumption of his glorious career-or is it simply a monument to the inertia of his private life, to his indifference to creature comforts beyond his animal appetites?
Even that, now that she thinks about it, she finds puerile but hardly innocent.
It’s like a boy’s tree house, a clubhouse, furnished with castoffs, relics from the real houses of the membership, carted here and thrown together to form a den, a cubbyhole, a, a… lair-yes, that’s it, a lair-into which they can crawl to do as they please-to eat junk food, to talk dirty, and to play nasty, sexy games.
The loft is pristine, is spotless, even in its emptiness; only the living quarters are slovenly, vaguely unsanitary.
It is as though he is at great pains to keep the empty floor between the rows of thick columns polished, a monument-vast, empty, meaningless and therefore imbued with mystery-to his greatness, with himself living there in a corner, tucked away unobrusively, the resident caretaker so that it can be concluded that every great work of art is, at least in part, an accident.
“How could he-in the case of architecture they-have done this? “Answer: They didn’t, the end product being far greater than that which they had intended, than that which, with their mere mortal skills, they dared intend.
“Let us take a clue from medicine.
“That noble profession is at its most noble-and its most honest-when it tells us that medicine does not heal, but merely creates the conditions under which the healing can take place.
“So it is with we creators, we artists, in many, if not all cases-we do not create the masterpiece, but rather that combination of skill and accident the results of which, when completed, are so proclaimed.
“Would that I had a glass of plain red table wine, ladies and gentlemen, and would that you each had one as well, so that together we might offer up a fervent artist’s toast-to accident! “Next week, we shall meet for the last time in this series, at which time we shall look behind the motivation, to answer the question, What is the true purpose of art? “Hint: Hiding cracks in the plaster is not the answer.
“See you all next week and have a good one.”
Applause and shuffling feet and Jessica joins Armand at the podium.
“Feel like a late supper out somewhere?” he asks. “I didn’t get a chance to eat before coming here tonight.”
“Fine with me,” she replies, thinking that this-just shows how little she knows about him, even living with him for a week now, while hanging on to her off campus apartment, which she keeps as an extension of her clothes closet as well as a mail drop.
What did he have to do with himself all day, he who has no classes to attend, unlike herself, that he had no chance for supper?
He gives no clue, makes no statement about his day.
Was he at the gym, working on some new routine?
Was he wandering the streets of the city, taking his muse for a walk, waiting for the stupid bitch to wake the fuck up?
Only when they have finished eating and waived dessert does he tell her, “I’ve quite a surprise for you, back at the loft.”
And her heart leaps within her as she prays to nobody in particular, Please let this mean what I think it does.
In the event, physically at least, it does.
She can actually smell it, a faintly musty odor of raw wood and freshly dried acryllic gesso, as soon as she steps off the elevator.
And the vast emptiness seems, somehow, crowded, as she spies the backs of stretched canvasses of every size, leaning against the pillars.
She wanders up and down the rows of. pillars, silently counting. He is not going to short-change her, dammit, not when she has conjured, has willed this to happen.
Well over a hundred canvasses, she counts, before she stops, turning to see him leaning against a pillar, hands in his pockets, watching her.
She goes over to the easels, disappointed that none yet bear a canvas.
But there, in their midst, the large, metal cart, wheeled out from the wall, its drawers all standing open to display row upon row of full tubes of oil and acryllic paint.
The lower shelves hold cans of paint, as well as turpentine, linseed oil, mineral spirits.
And on top of the cart, if there were any doubt but that he is about to recommence, glass jars, each sprouting a plume of brushes.
“Well, Jessica? Waddaya think?” “Armand! I, I don’t know what to say! “You mean, you mean your, your muse… your muse actually…
And Armand nods and smiles, redfaced in his delight, as she falls into his arms.
She knew it, she knew it, she knew it!
There was Irene, then there was Darlene, and now-“I was walking along Central Park West, heading for the Metropolitan to visit ‘Irene I’ as I do from time to time. I had just come from the gym and lunch-a late lunch, actually. I had stopped in on the way up from downtown at Ray’s for pizza. I decided to have the pepperoni, two slices because I was hungry. I could have gone for three, but…”
Jessica tunes him out.
She is on the verge of realizing her dreams and this fucking yutz is standing here informing her of his stomach contents this afternoon.
“… and suddenly, it struck me.
“What was I doing, visiting the past, when right here before me, right in front of my nose-”
She pulls back from him gently,. Positioning herself right in front of his nose.
“Was the answer! “So I called Philippe, my canvas guy, I went over to the art supply store and the camera shop, and I spent the rest of the afternoon unpacking paint, putting stuff away, taking delivery of the canvasses and cursing myself for a fool, for taking so long to listen to myself.
“I mean, here I am, discussing aesthetics and the artistic process, instead of being in the midst of the process itself! “If only I had seen it before I began my lecture series!”
“Maybe you simply lacked the right… inspiration back then.”
Begging the question. Fishing for compliments.
Wanting to hear him say it, to give credit where credit is due.
“No, no, that wasn’t it.
“It was more a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.
“That’s it, it was exactly like that! “I had concentrated so hard on peering in and in and into the depths of the individual that I totally ignored the world of the common denominator.
“All of my work to date is defective! “It’s like reading a fucking dictionary, looking at the goddam things! “You can read the meanings writ therein, but they tell you nothing, nothing, nothing of the outside world, of reality itself! “A cute, clever trick, they were, and that’s all they were, all they are, wherever they are, which is out of my sight, which is all to the good.
“We must look through the individual, past the individual. We most proceed from the particular to the general. We must go beyond the real, beyond our perception of the real to that which makes a statement, which expresses a truth to which each of us can relate, to the interlace, the confrontation between the• individual and reality, to the manner in which we handle and fail to handle the problem of self and other.”
“I’ll get my things and clear out.”
“You do that, uh…
“Jessica,” she prompts.
“Right. Of course. I tell you, when this thing came over me, it was like a bolt of lightning struck! “How many situations does an individual confront in the course of daily existence? Millions! Billions! “And what are the complexes, the reactions which are activated by such confrontation? “Fear, hatred, desire, you name it! “And underlying it all, the common thread, the drone in the bagpipe of our existence-sexuality! “The mechanism of confrontation, of the individual with the world, is that of our own sexuality.
“All encounters are fundamentally sexual, and by stripping away the veneer of society, of convention, we can reveal, we can reveal-it remains to be seen, one canvas at a time, just what it is that we can reveal.”