Op.
15
OR
CARNAL
SACRIFICE
Long
Prose
Copyright
©
2011 John O'Loughlin
____________
CHAPTER
ONE
Keith
Logan
hadn't
been to a party in years and, now that he had met the hostess
and been
escorted into the tightly packed room where the festivities were taking
place,
he felt curiously shy and embarrassed, like a young adolescent on his
first
date. The room was certainly more
crowded than expectations had led him to believe, and with the crowd
went the
noise of chatter and laughter, occasional coughs and shouts, elaborate
gestures
and sudden jerks.
Casting around for
psychological support
amidst the welter of strange faces, Logan's gaze fell upon the rather
large
head of the art critic Martin Thurber, and he immediately set about
drawing the
man's attention with a clear if rather brief wave of his hand, which,
as if by
a miracle, duly produced positive results.
It was Thurber who had invited him along to the party in the
first
place, so it was only proper that the one familiar and vaguely sedate
face in
the room should act as a kind of life-support harness and straightaway
come
floating to his rescue through the choppy sea of animated faces
swimmingly at
large there. The hostess, who had so
promptly answered the door to him a moment before, was already being
pulled
away by the call of duty to answer it to someone else, leaving Logan
stranded
in her turbulent wake just inside the large brightly lit drawing room
in which
he now floundered. Hence the curious
shyness and embarrassment which had so suddenly descended upon him, in
the
absence of his customary self-confidence.
But
Martin
Thurber
was coming to his rescue, brimming over, it appeared, with
self-confidence and pleasure. "So
glad you could make it, Keith," he announced, extending what seemed
like a
life-saving hand to the new arrival's nearest shoulder and gently
patting it a
few times. "I was beginning to fear
you weren't coming."
Logan smiled in an
ambivalent cross between
apology and reassurance at the fair-haired, clean-shaven face before
him, the
light-blue eyes of which twinkled mysteriously and even a shade
mischievously,
it seemed to him, in the festive atmosphere.
It was a wonder to himself that he had
actually
come, since the prospect of visiting this Highgate house unaccompanied,
and
without any foreknowledge whatsoever of who or what he would encounter
there, had
more than once cast a serious shadow of doubt over his prior resolution
to turn
up. But to have backed down at the last
moment, after he had assured Thurber of his pressing desire to attend,
would
hardly have contributed towards the friendship which had recently
sprung-up
between them and, since he had precious few friends anyway, he thought
it
expedient not to disappoint the poor fellow.
"I didn't want to turn up too early," he averred, following
the termination of his ambiguous smile.
"And no difficulty finding
your way
here, I trust?" Thurber remarked.
"Nothing to grumble about,"
"Good."
Thurber's eyes twinkled in an even more
mysterious, not to say mischievous, fashion.
He was just about to add some banality about no address being
easier to
find when a burst of piercing laughter from a group of revellers to
their left
interrupted the flow of his thoughts, inducing him, instead, to say:
"Well, now that you've arrived, allow me to introduce you to our
host."
A few yards to their right a
well-groomed,
silver-haired man of average build but more than average height was
standing on
the edge of one such group, gracefully chatting to an attractive young
woman
with light-green eyes who peered into his handsome face like a person
intent upon
discovering the secrets of the universe there.
It was towards him that Thurber boldly advanced, dragging his
reluctant
acquaintance along by the sleeve.
"Allow me to introduce a
highly
talented novelist by name of Keith Logan," he respectfully
interposed, compelling the man's attention.
"Keith, this is Edward Hurst, our magnanimous host!"
Hurst smiled magnanimously
before extending
a rather clammy hand, which the newcomer dutifully clasped. "Delighted to meet you," he
announced, focusing a sharp pair of dark-grey eyes upon the latter's
aquiline
nose. "I've heard a little about
you from Martin, though I haven't yet got round to reading any of your
books. But let me introduce you to
someone who may have - Miss Greta Ryan, who is something of a writer in
her own
way."
He was of course referring
to the
attractive young woman beside him, whose attention had, in the
meantime,
shifted down a gear, so to speak, in its change of direction. She extended a slender hand and smiled shyly
through a moist pair of sensuous lips.
"I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you too," she confessed,
as
"He's purely an
abstractionist,"
Thurber revealed, coming to his social rescue again.
"So what he writes is senseless from a
representational or, rather, narrative and descriptive standpoint."
"Really?"
"Not 'completely',"
The dark-haired woman to
whom he had just
been introduced wanted to know why readers should be made conscious of
the
'sound and symbolic nature' of words instead of being told a story, as
with
most novels. It didn't quite make sense
to her, she confessed.
"It's not supposed to make
sense!"
"No, in actual fact it only
makes
sense from a philosophical and avant-garde angle," said
"Even to the extent of
writing
meaningless novels?"
"Absolutely,"
This opinion could hardly be
expected to
win much approval from people like Edward Hurst and Greta Ryan, who
were
already a trifle tipsy and therefore not particularly interested in
hearing
what a sober abstract novelist had to say concerning the justification
of his
craft. If
It wasn't really, but Logan
pretended
otherwise, saying: "Yes, a beer would do fine," as he briefly turned
towards the table on which bottles of wine, sherry, gin, whisky, and
beer stood
packed closely together waiting, like whores in a brothel, for
prospective
clients. Although the table was partly
obscured by intervening guests, enough of it was visible from where he
stood to
leave him in no doubt as to the heterogeneous nature of its alcoholic
contents,
about which he felt obliged to entertain a private misgiving.
But Greta Ryan, who was less
under the
influence than their magnanimous host, seemed unwilling to let the
matter rest
where Logan had so awkwardly dropped it and asked him, in a
slightly-strained
and mocking tone-of-voice, whether he really thought what he wrote
would induce
people to turn away from symbols and dedicate themselves to the elusive
attainment of pure knowledge and enlightenment instead?
Wasn't it more likely that they would simply
become bored with it and return to something more meaningful?
"Well, whether or not they
do, the
essential thing is that I should continue to explore the field in which
I'm working
until it wins wider approval, and not be disheartened or deflected by
the
indifference and even hostility it may incur from various people in the
meantime," Logan replied confidently.
"As a pioneer in the realm of literary progress, I must continue
to
forge ahead, in accordance with an appropriately pertinent response to
the
contemporary urban environment, no matter what others might think. If a majority of the reading public prefer
straightforward stories of one kind or another, that's too bad! I can't force everyone up to a level
transcending the fictional or, indeed, expect them to appreciate what
I'm doing
when they're insufficiently motivated or qualified to do so. I can only set an example, lead the way
forwards in response to my duty as a serious writer, and hope that the
comparatively small percentage of persons who now appreciate my work
will be
augmented, in due course, by a much wider public. By
which
time, however, the equivalent of the
present few will doubtless have given-up reading altogether, having
attained to
a more transcendental context than currently exists, in which abstract
literature, no less than abstract music or art, would have ceased to
appeal to
them."
Thurber had meanwhile
returned with a glass
of foaming beer, which he handed straight to
"Yes, I feel that it may be
of some
significance in furthering the rapidly escalating process of
de-intellectualization upon which we're currently embarked, and thus
contribute
towards freeing us from the tyranny of verbal concepts," the abstract
novelist averred. "It's merely a
milestone on the road to total emancipation, timeless bliss. Whether we outgrow language, and hence
literature, in another century or after several centuries ... is
relatively
unimportant. The essential thing is that
we should
eventually outgrow it, and I have no doubt
that this is what we're currently engaged in doing - each according to
his own
fashion. If primitive men were beneath
language, then it seems not unlikely that future men will be above it,
especially the most advanced future men - those on the point of
becoming
godlike."
Thurber shook his head
slightly and tipped
back a stiff draught of wine. The
conversation was much too serious for his liking, and hardly the kind
of thing
he expected Eddie Hurst would take kindly to, bearing in mind his
hedonistic
nature. The beer in
"Well, in a way I suppose I
do,"
Thurber replied half-heartedly, unsure of whether to take a
conservative or a
libertarian stance. "At least I'm
of the opinion that, largely thanks to media like cinema and
television, we're
now taking pure seeing and abstract contemplation more seriously than
ever
before. Some of us are, at any
rate."
"And would you agree that
we're in the
process of becoming godlike?" Greta asked, an ironic smile on her
lips. "Or even goddess-like?"
she added, as an afterthought.
Thurber glanced uneasily at
Keith Logan and
noted the slightly pained expression on the latter's ordinarily bland
face. "Well, that's not really for
me to say," he confessed, "since I don't make a study of such matters
- unlike my, er, learned friend here. But for what it's worth, I do believe that
we're closer to the godly these days than to the beastly.
We're advanced men of sorts."
"Yes, I think it's fair to
say that
the principal tendency of human evolution is towards the godlike,"
"And how, pray, do you
conceive of the
godlike?" Greta wanted to know, taking up the challenge.
"Yes, how do you?"
Unruffled, Logan replied:
"The godlike
appertains to a condition of life beyond man, in which the superconscious
completely triumphs over the subconscious, and consequently egocentric
dualism,
appertaining to man at virtually any stage of his evolution, is
transcended."
"The superconscious?"
"Neither had I," Greta
echoed,
with a titter of disrespectful laughter.
"Well we do, which is why we
happen to
have a consciousness,"
"Really?"
"More correctly, the
fusion-point between
the subconscious and superconscious parts
of the
psyche which, translated into physiological terminology, corresponds to
what
has been called the old brain and the new brain, as discussed by Koestler in, amongst other works, Janus
- A Summing Up," Logan replied, "the old brain being
predominantly an emotional and sensuous phenomenon, the new brain, by
contrast,
having intellectual and spiritual implications which set it morally
apart."
"I'm afraid I haven't read
the book in
question,"
"Well, whether or not you've
read
it," the writer rejoined, "the fact remains that a dichotomy in the
psyche has long been acknowledged by psychologists and thinkers, and
this
dichotomy should be equated, in psychological terminology, with the
subconscious and the superconscious, the
meeting-point of which gives rise to everyday consciousness as we
generally
understand it."
Edward Hurst appeared to be
even more
perplexed than before. He didn't like
the idea that Freud and the few other psychologists he had bothered to
read in
the past may not have said the last word on the psyche or, indeed, that
what
they had
said may not always have corresponded to absolute truth.
He didn't like it one little bit! Even
so,
he wasn't prepared to believe that
this abstract novelist, whom he hadn't even set eyes on prior to
Thurber's
impertinent intrusion, was in possession of a more comprehensive
assessment of
the psyche than the textbook authorities themselves, irrespective of
whether
the textbooks he happened to have read weren't exactly the most
up-to-date ones
but, like their authors, a shade time-worn.
Still, let the novelist speak, let him entertain!
Consciousness, then, was a consequence of the
fusion of subconscious and superconscious
minds, and
all one had to do to become godlike was transcend this fusion and break
away
into - what?
"Pure spirit, in which the
ego ceases
to have any say and we attain to the post-human millennium, to the
blissful
salvation which, in its wisdom, Christianity has been promising us for
centuries,"
"You mean our future
descendants
will," interposed Thurber, who was reminded of what he had already
learnt
on the subject from previous discussions with the novelist.
"Yes, precisely!" the latter
rejoined. "Not us personally but,
rather, those who'll correspond to the culmination of human evolution
and thus
vindicate, through their spiritual perfection, the long and often
difficult
struggle of humanity to perpetuate itself.
We exist, believe it or not, as mortal links in the chain of
human
evolution, as means to a higher end, torchbearers on the road to
ultimate
truth. Even the great mystics, such as
Saint Teresa and St John of the Cross, were no more than links, if
relatively
important ones, in the evolutionary chain - pointers, as it were, in
the
general direction of millennial salvation.
Their occasional moments of ecstasy, of spiritual enlightenment,
during
which the ego was eclipsed by the superconscious,
would
indeed
appear paltry by comparison with the ecstatic experiences of
people living, say, hundreds of years into the future, who will
doubtless be
able to tune-in, as it were, to their superconscious
minds on a much more frequent, not to say intensive, basis. And compared with beings who spent all of
their time in the superconscious, who had
become
completely godlike, such transient ecstasies of transcendent beatitude
as were
experienced by the leading mystics of the past would indeed pale to a
comparative insignificance - highly significant though they undoubtedly
were to
their recipients at the moment of experience!
But anyone who had transcended the subconscious - and hence
egocentric
reference - to the extent of existing wholly in the superconscious
wouldn't be concerned with what had gone before anyway, with the
comparatively
modest degree of enlightenment attained by those who'd had the
misfortune to
have been born into a lower stage of human evolution.
For his consciousness would be totally
immersed in the divine light, and, as such, no reflections on the
thorny
subject of spiritual progress through the centuries would occur to him.
He would have ceased to relate to the world
of
human evolution, having left the last vestiges of humanity behind."
At this point, Greta Ryan
cast a dubious
glance at her host and sought temporary refuge in the sweet wine
to-hand. For his part,
No, he didn't like the idea
of being no
more than a fragile link in a terribly long chain one little bit! Yet although he was impatient with the
conversational trend, and annoyed that a perfectly frivolous evening
was
becoming, in spite of alcoholic indulgence, a matter of serious debate,
he
couldn't resist the temptation to ask his guest what he thought about
the
Afterlife - in other words, about the prospect of life-after-death -
and
whether it didn't have more applicability to salvation than this
business of a
post-human millennium. "I mean,
don't you think that salvation will come, if it's to come at all, the
other
side of the grave?"
Keith Logan emphatically
shook his
head. "I've no use for traditional
concepts of life-after-death," he confessed, casting his gaze upon all
three listeners successively.
"Neither in the sense of a paradise to which the Good are
admitted,
nor in the rather more puzzling sense of a disembodied state which
enables
spirits to travel around, visit elderly females and dictate messages,
dream
their own dreams, perform miraculous feats of a mathematical order, or
do any
number of other things scarcely imaginable to the living."
"What about the Oriental
concept of a
posthumous Clear Light ... with which the spirits of the dead either
merge, and
thus experience spiritual salvation in undiluted transcendence or,
assuming
they can't bring themselves to do that, continue to dream their past
and,
indeed, certain future experiences until such time as, circumstances
permitting, they can return to the world in the guise of a new-born
child?" This time it was Greta who
was putting the question, and she was of course alluding to the type of
afterlife hypothesis explored by Aldous
Huxley in Time
Must
Have
a Stop - a novel in which Eustace Barnack,
its
principal
character and afterlife 'guinea pig', is given a choice
between
merging with the Clear Light of the Void or retaining his egocentric
personality, and eventually opts for the latter, thereby necessitating
reincarnation.
Again
"That isn't a view Aldous
Huxley would have agreed with," Greta countered, recalling to mind what
the great author had written on the subject of the Ground and its
relation to
the Father in The
Devils
of Loudun.
"I quite agree,"
"So, according to your
assessment of
religious evolution, the Ground is purely illusory," Greta rejoined in
a
solemn tone-of-voice.
"I find it difficult not to
believe
so," confirmed Logan, who was now obliged to compromise with the
reference
he had made to Huxley's theory and not deepen the discussion to include
a
distinction between the Creator as Jehovah and the Creator as Father,
Judaic
and Christian alternatives, and the possible closer association of the
Ground
to the former than to the latter, which, after all, was less an
Oriental
extrapolation from, in all probability, a major star of the Galaxy ...
than one
partly extrapolated, in Occidental fashion, from the sun and partly
from the
phallus of pagan precedent, in order to accommodate both the earthly
Mother and
the lunar Son - a thing which the Jews, with their religious
objectivity in
regard to the concept of Creator, had been unprepared to do. And for good reason, since there is no
contiguity between what is truly stellar on the alpha plane of creative
deity
and what is extrapolated from the moon as a 'Son of God', and therefore
no
possibility of a solar Father in the Christian sense.
"All that really concerns us as
post-Christian transcendentalists," he went on, "is this intimation
of God - as joy, light, spirit, etc., - in the superconscious
mind. Outside of it there is just the
world, the planets, stars, galaxies. If
the Holy Spirit is to emerge from anywhere, it can only be from the superconscious."
Having maintained a discreet
if peeved
silence during the preceding rather too esoteric conversation for his
liking,
Edward Hurst now ventured to ask the novelist whether he really thought
that
man would eventually become godlike by transcending the subconscious
mind
altogether. "After all," he
continued, snorting slightly in supercilious detachment, "isn't it
somewhat
unlikely that man will ever desire to live wholly in a transcendent
state-of-mind, and thus forsake all consciousness of the outside world?"
Greta endorsed this question
with a
snigger. "And how would he
survive?" she wanted to know.
"Obviously, I'm not in a
position to
know for sure what will happen,"
At this remark,
"I shouldn't be at all
surprised,"
"Really?"
"Well, I'd find it extremely
difficult
to believe that we just appeared on the face of the earth, kind of
out-of-the-blue, especially in a world where everything can be claimed
to have
evolved from something lower, including the apes themselves," Logan
retorted, frankly surprised by Hurst's naiveté.
"After all, we know that the earliest men tended to look more
beastly, more ape-like in appearance, than their properly human
successors. In all probability, their
immediate predecessors were if not apes then certainly something
correspondingly
bestial and pre-human. They doubtless
went on four legs, or two legs and two arms, more often than they
walked."
"And presumably they were
subject to
subconscious dominion," Greta suggested, returning to the fray.
"Certainly to a greater
extent than the
earliest men,"
"For a life form completely
dominated
by the subconscious," he went on, warming to his theme, "one has to
turn to the plant world - to vegetables, trees, flowers, shrubs, etc.,
which
are wholly sensuous and constitute the lowest level of organic life, a
level
which evolution is gradually working away from in the guise of man who,
if he
subsequently succeeds in transcending his humanity, should attain to a
level
radically antithetical to that of subconscious stupor ... in superconscious bliss, and thus bring evolution
to
completion. Thus it isn't so much the
beasts that are antithetical to the godlike as ... the plants - those
victims
of perpetual darkness. And because a
life form exists which signifies complete enslavement to the
subconscious, we
have no reason to doubt that a life form can't eventually be brought
into
existence which will signify complete freedom from the subconscious
and,
consequently, total allegiance to the superconscious. The fact of the existence of the one
presupposes the possibility of the future existence of the other - the
former
in diversity, the latter in unity. We
have no reason, therefore, to deride it out-of-hand."
"So it would appear that
earthly
evolution is a journey, so to speak, from plants to gods or, rather,
the
godlike," Thurber remarked, feeling it was about time he contributed
something to the debate again, "and that animals and men are the
in-between
developments en
route, the sharers of utilitarian consciousness."
"Precisely!"
"You must have a poor
opinion of
nature," Greta deduced, following a short pause.
"Generally speaking I
suppose I
have,"
"But surely nature is a part
of God's
creation," Hurst objected, frowning menacingly, "and that if one is
to worship God, one should do so through His creations, through the
beauty of
the flowers and the goodness and wholesomeness of the fruit,
vegetables, grain,
etc., which He has caused to grow. Not
to mention through the beauty of the autonomous life-forms He has also
made."
"It's all very well to
worship what you
call God through such natural creations as we can take pleasure in or
deduce
some profit from," Logan retorted.
"But what of those creations that we can't?
What, for example, of all the stinging
nettles that exist and would doubtless exist in far greater abundance
if man
didn't take the trouble to root them out or cut them back?
What of all the weeds that likewise would
exist in far greater abundance if allowed to do so?
What of those trees or bushes upon which grow
various types of poison berry? What of
the prickly thorns, dense bracken, destructive creepers, poisonous
toadstools,
hurtful brambles? What, too, of the
disease-ridden swamps, treacherous quicksands,
man-eating
plants,
active volcanoes, periodic earthquakes, suffocating
jungles? What of tarantulas, vipers,
piranhas, sharks, mosquitoes, vultures, lice, rats, skunks, barracudas,
stingrays, men-of-war, wolves, foxes, pythons, flies, gnats,
crocodiles,
locusts, wasps, etc., ad
nauseam?
Tiger,
tiger, burning bright
In
the forests of the night.
What
immortal hand or eye
Dare
frame thy fearful symmetry?
"And what of all those
creatures who
go on two legs whom one is unable to take pleasure in - congenital
lunatics and
criminals, ruthless oppressors and exploiters, mass murderers and
torturers,
hypocrites and liars, bullies and vandals, rapists and perverts, et al? Is one to thank God for having put them
into
the
world,
too?" He looked from face to
face, dwelling more lengthily on
"So you assume!" snapped
Hurst
with the air of a man who knew better, and, desiring to restore himself
to the
party spirit the intellectual intrusion of Keith Logan had effectively
dampened, he abruptly turned away from the three people in whose
presence he
had spent the past thirty minutes and swiftly headed in the direction
of a
vivacious group of conversationalists across the far side of the room,
whose
revelry suggested that they were oblivious of anything Logan might have
said.
"Well," sighed Greta,
suddenly
conscious of an uneasy vacuum created by their host's departure, "I
suppose I ought to refill my wine glass while the opportunity
prevails." And, so saying, she took
herself off in the general direction of the booze.
Thurber shook his head
slightly and sought
temporary refuge in his own glass of wine.
The evening hadn't really turned out as he had hoped, and
largely
because he hadn't expected
"Well," Logan sighed in
turn,
after he had taken stock of the room's other human contents, most of
whom
looked pretty unprepossessing to him, "is there anyone else you wish to
introduce me to?"
"Er,
yes,
I
suppose there is," Thurber responded somewhat shamefacedly, and this
time
he emitted a faint but audible grunt of despair.
CHAPTER
TWO
"You
do
find
yourself some strange friends, don't you?" Greta chuckled, as she
ran a playful hand over the back of Martin Thurber's neck and drew
herself a little
closer to him on the settee.
"Talking all the time about evolution and God and the superconscious, when we ought to have been
enjoying
ourselves over much lighter matters! One
would have thought we were at a college lecture rather than at a
perfectly
innocuous party!"
Thurber smiled in agreement
and cast her an
apologetic glance. "Yes, Keith
Logan is a somewhat serious man," he conceded. "Though
I
dare say that, had I known more
about him before tonight, I'd never have invited him along to
"Well, let's hope you don't
live to
regret it," Greta commented, becoming a shade more serious.
"How d'you
m-mean?" he stammered.
"Oh, through
"Yes, you needn't remind
me!"
exclaimed Thurber, who then sighed and rested his head on the back of
the
settee, eyes staring up imploringly, one would have thought, at the
whitewashed
ceiling. "But what could
"That's not for me to say,
is
it?" Greta rejoined, removing her by-now inconvenienced hand from
behind
Thurber's neck and resting it on his nearest shoulder instead. "Though the most likely response would
be to leave you out of the guest list he draws up for any future party
he may
hold."
"I could quite live with
that!"
averred the art critic with gusto.
"Maybe, but that's only the
most
likely response," said Greta.
"There's always the possibility, on the other hand, that he
might
do something worse.... Like prohibiting you from contributing any
further
articles to his periodical out of fear they would reflect
Thurber suddenly swallowed
hard and sharply
turned his head in Greta's direction.
"You’re kidding!" he cried.
"I wish I were," she
responded. "But where someone as
temperamental as Eddie Hurst is concerned, one can never be sure."
"It's a sobering thought,"
Thurber admitted, his head still somewhat tipsy from the combined
effects of
little over ten glasses of white wine.
"Well, as yet it's only a
thought, so
let's hope it remains one," sighed Greta, before relapsing into silence.
For the past six months
Martin Thurber had
regularly contributed to the arts magazine which Hurst edited, and
throughout
that time he hadn't given so much as a single thought to what would
happen to
him or where he would alternatively send his art reviews if the editor
decided
to dispense with them. He had been so
confident that they would continue to meet with Hurst's approval that
the
prospect of being left without a magazine to regularly contribute to
... seemed
no less remote than the prospect of being left without regular material
to
contribute to it. Yet what if Hurst were
to drop him? He mentally shuddered at the
thought of
it! He wouldn't necessarily find another
quality magazine so willing to publish him - at least not immediately. Had it not been for the fact that he knew
Hurst's son at school and been acquainted with one or two of the
magazine's
regular contributors, it's most unlikely that he would have got his
reviews
accepted in the first place. Another
time he might not have such luck. But,
of course, it was only supposition on Greta's part, and he knew from
experience
that her imagination tended to run off the rails - especially after she
had
imbibed a few too many drinks!
"A curious thing actually,
but I
didn't see much of
"I shouldn't worry
yourself,"
Greta advised him, patting his nearest shoulder. "After
all,
it isn't fair on the others
that we should expect him to be talking to us all the time, is it?"
"No, but ... well, did you
get an
opportunity to talk with him again?" Thurber asked.
Greta shook her head. "As a matter of fact I spent most of the
remaining time in conversation with Yvette Sanderson and Sheila Kells, plus a little time with you," she
revealed. "Frankly, I'd had enough of his
conversation before
"I expect it comes with
practice," Thurber commented matter-of-factly.
"Yes, but really!" Greta
exclaimed. "You might incline to
believe he's an imbecile when, in reality, he seems to be one of the
most
intelligent and enlightened of men. And
not unhandsome either, if his large eyes, thin nose, and neat little
mouth are
anything to judge by! I'm surprised he
turned up alone. Doesn't he have a wife
or girlfriend, then?"
With a gentle shrug of the
shoulders,
Thurber replied: "I don't honestly know, though I shouldn't be
surprised
if he doesn't, what with that air of saintliness about him. As yet, I haven't inquired that deeply into
his private affairs, partly from fear of giving offence and partly
because he
hasn't given me any encouragement to, but I'm under the impression that
he's
more accustomed to solitude than company, at any rate."
Indeed, had he been completely honest with
his girlfriend, Thurber would also have admitted to being under the
impression
that she had taken a fancy to the novelist in spite of her surface
objections
to much of what he said that evening.
But because he didn't wish to offend her in any way, least of
all now
that he was in her flat and had it in mind to ravish her seductive body
in due
course, he contented himself with intimating, instead, that Logan had
taken a
fancy to her,
if
only to gauge her responses.
"Oh, what makes you say
that?"
she asked, breaking into an intrigued smile.
"Simply what he told me
concerning the
attractiveness of the young lady he'd been standing near prior to
"How flattering!" Greta
exclaimed. "I wouldn't have
expected him to say such a thing, especially as we didn't exactly see
eye-to-eye during the greater part of our conversation."
Thurber felt a trifle
disconcerted by this
all-too-evident admission, but he could tell, all the same, that Greta
was
secretly gratified. "Well, the fact
of your mental differences evidently didn't preclude him from
appreciating your
physical ones," he facetiously declared, lying through his teeth.
"And when, exactly, did he
reveal his
impression of me to you, if that's not an impertinent question?" Greta
wanted to know.
Slightly disconcerted by the
necessity of
improvising yet another lie on the spur-of-the-moment, Thurber said:
"Whilst you were having your glass refilled and I was about to
introduce
him to someone else."
"Oh, I see."
Greta emitted a faint laugh and drew her legs
up closer to him. "Well, I suppose
I am
attractive, aren't I?" she remarked.
"Naturally," he admitted,
placing
a deferential hand on her nearest knee.
"Even in dark-blue stockings and a light-grey skirt."
"Perhaps more so where men
like
This time it was Thurber's
turn to laugh. "Yes, that could be true,"
he
agreed. "Such an appearance would
doubtless appeal to his serious-mindedness." He
rubbed
his hand gently backwards and
forwards across that part of her thigh just above the knee, and then
softly
asked what she was wearing underneath her skirt?
"See for yourself," she
blandly
advised him, smiling.
He lifted up the rim of her
skirt and shyly
peered underneath. "Hmm, a short
pink slip and ..." he deliberated a moment, lifted up the slip and
peered
underneath that too, "... oh, complementary colours!
What taste!
What discernment! A prim exterior
and a naughty, seductive interior! One
of your favourite ploys!"
"And one that you well-nigh
insist
on!" she reminded him.
"Yes, prude and whore in
one,"
Thurber confirmed. "What could be
more alluring? Outside - the perfectly
respectable, responsible, and admirable social lady.
Inside or, rather, underneath - the ... well
..."
"Yes?"
"Not exactly the converse of
all
that," he remarked, teetering on the brink of shame, "but certainly
something approximating to it."
"Martin!"
She playfully slapped his wandering hand.
"The shameless seducer and
arch-sensualist whose sexy undies make it
perfectly
clear that the lady in question has a private life and, at times, a
rather active
one, too!" he exclaimed smilingly.
"Only because you make it
so, you
dirty brute!" she retorted, pouting sensuously.
"I wish I could believe
you," he
laughed. "But when you dress like
this ..." again he lifted up the rim of her skirt "... well, who's to
say to what extent I'm responsible for my behaviour?"
"Anyone would think you were
an
old-fashioned behaviourist!" Greta objected.
Thurber smiled and said:
"Well, you're
my stimulus, my motivation, as Schopenhauer would say, and when I tell
you to
sport an arse, I do so in response to the very obvious fact that you
happen to
have one, and that it happens, moreover, to be an exquisitely
proportioned and
admirably shaped arse - an arse in a million, if you'll permit me to
flatter
the panties off you in Logan's stead."
Greta blushed faintly and
giggled in
apparent confirmation of her lover's estimation. "And
are
you going to tell me to sport
it this evening?" she joked.
"Certainly not!" he replied. "But the fact remains that I could do so
if I really wanted to, couldn't I? I
could even avail myself of the clysters if I thought an old-fashioned
enema
would be of any sexual use to you? I
could spank or strap your behind until it was as red as an acutely
embarrassed
or even angered face, like Eddie Hurst's.
I could even stand you on your head and stare down at your
rear-end from
above."
"You horrible bully!" Greta
protested ironically.
"Well, of course, I won't do
any of
those things," Thurber declared, lowering his voice a little. "For they would only bore or depress
me. Yet the fact remains that I could
get you to do more or less anything I wanted, couldn't I?"
There was a modest silence
on Greta's part.
"Couldn't I?" he repeated,
almost
threateningly.
"Hmm, I suppose so," she at
last
conceded. "Provided, however, that
it didn't unduly inconvenience me or cause me too much pain."
Thurber smiled his
satisfaction - the
satisfaction, one might be forgiven for imagining, of a baby who had
just received
its dummy and was now perfectly content with life.
"Yes, quite," he confirmed,
nodding. "But the fact that you are
prepared
to
obey
most of my orders is one of the things I particularly admire about
you....
If, on the other hand, you were as modest and prudish in private as you
generally aspire to being in public, I should never be able to stand
you. But the contrast between your two
selves -
the public-spirited lady and the private-sensuous whore - is
exquisitely
endearing to me and rarely fails to arouse my desire.
To think that the well-educated and
highly-cultured person who is discussing evolution and some kind of
futuristic
millennium with a fanatically progressive novelist like Keith Logan,
one hour,
also happens to be the highly seductive sensual creature who allows me
to raise
her skirt and, hopefully, stimulate her clitoris the next - well, it's
always a
source of amazement to me! To say that
we live in one world would indeed be a gross understatement!"
Greta listened in
half-humorous resignation
to the sordid confessions which issued, in hyperbolic disarray, from
the
indiscreet mouth of the somewhat wine-intoxicated art critic beside
her, while
his hand continued to rove, as though by remote control, over her blue-stockinged thighs and even, she could barely
fail to
notice, over parts of the more ample flesh above the level where the
stocking
came to an abrupt end! She had heard
variations on this crazy theme before anyway, so they came as no great
surprise
or revelation to her. Had it not been
for the fact that she knew exactly how Thurber's paradoxical little
mind
worked, she wouldn't have taken the trouble to conform to his
specifications of
the split personality, the lady/whore, in the first place, but would
have
dressed in some other way - possibly with a more flamboyant or sexy
external
appearance than tonight. But by now she
was perfectly acquainted with his needs, and thus in no doubt as to the
best
ways of satisfying them.
Not that she always made a
point of
dressing according to his ambiguous requirements. For
there
were days, fortunately to say, when
she didn't see him or he her, times when it was possible for her to
return to a
less formal appearance and even dispense with the antithetical
complement of
sexy undies.
On such days - less frequent, alas, than formerly - she would
simply
dress to please herself, whether that entailed a reversal of her
customary role
or, alternatively, a complete negation of it in either a totally prim
or a
totally seductive one-sidedness. But as
soon as it became known that Thurber would be visiting her or vice
versa, back
would come the dual images he particularly admired.
And, of course, he would take her out to
dinner, sport her around town, revel in her ladylike appearance and
conduct, her
ennobling and educative turns of speech, the generally prim mien she
was under
obligation to maintain as much as possible, especially at the concert
hall or
theatre where, invariably, they would witness one of the more serious
and
spiritually edifying performances or productions - a Beethoven concerto
or a
Shakespeare tragedy, a Tchaikovsky symphony or an Ibsen indictment of
bourgeois
convention. Finally, after a decorous
return-journey to either his or her flat, he would deprive her of her
outer
garments, her ladylike persona, and, goaded-on by the tantalizing
spectacle of
what lay seductively beneath, proceed to revel in the very opposite
qualities
from those he had previously esteemed, dragging her through the most
excruciatingly carnal of sensuous abandonments,
whispering
and
sometimes fairly bellowing foul epithets or denigrating phrases
into her tiny ears, and behaving, in short, with all the undisguised
relish of
a full-blooded satyr bent on completely dominating the object of its
lust.
Oh yes, there could be no
doubt as to the
kind of relationship Martin Thurber particularly liked, and, despite
occasional
lapses of conduct or appearance, Greta had done her best to make sure
he damn
well got it! She had done her best
tonight, at Hurst's party, to play up to her public image of decorous
lady, and
now she would do her best to let her hair down, as it were, and adopt
the very
opposite role. It suited her to play
along with Thurber's demands, since she also profited from them. And even if, to a superficial eye, it might
appear rather constricting to dress in a specific way, according to the
aforementioned criteria, she knew from experience that there were
numerous
possibilities to be exploited - possibilities which encompassed
anything from
dark, tight-fitting knee-length skirts and dresses for the public image
... to
brightly coloured slips, panties, suspender belts, G-strings, and
brassieres
for the private one. Once one had
mastered the basic rules of the game, in Koestlerian
parlance, there was no shortage of viable strategies!
The very fact that Thurber had been agreeably
surprised by her all-pink attire was sufficient proof of that!
"So now I begin to
understand why you
specifically invited Keith Logan along to
Thurber smiled defensively. "That's only part of the truth," he
conceded, continuing to stroke and fondle her thigh as though she were
no more
than a lump of dough to be kneaded into some sort of commercial shape
prior to
a pressing transaction.
"And were you pleased by the
performance we gave you?" she inquired of him.
"Yes, in general," he
replied. "Though I was less than
pleased by the fact that
"Unlike you, who can only
bring out
the beast," Greta quipped, simultaneously proffering him another of her
playful slaps. "But, really, you
could have told him that I was your regular girlfriend or something. Had you done so, he might not have said what
he apparently revealed to you about me, when I was out of earshot."
"What, that you were
attractive?" And all of a sudden
Thurber began to blush, and to a degree quite untypical of the man. "Well, I soon let him know who you were
once he had said it," he lied.
"That shut him up! But I
didn't really have time to introduce him to you earlier, for
Greta smiled her
acknowledgement of this
rather cryptic statement and momentarily abandoned herself to picturing
the novelist's
face in her mind's eye - seeing once again the dark-brown hair, smooth
brow
(rather Nietzschean in its elevation, she
thought,
and obviously that of a highbrow), gently aquiline nose, firm lips, and
angular
chin. She imagined him sitting next to her
on the settee instead of Thurber, imagined his hand on her leg and his
breath
on her hair. Would he be as good at
loving her as at lecturing her about evolution and the coming
post-human
millennium, she wondered? Curiously
there was no reason to suppose the contrary, not if he really found her
attractive and was as romantically disposed as his handsome appearance
might
have led one to suppose. Yet if he
didn't have a wife or even ... no, there was no point indulging in idle
conjectures about him. Better to
concentrate on what lay to-hand than to imagine greater and probably
illusory
pleasures elsewhere. At least Thurber
could be depended upon to come to the point eventually, even if he did
have a
rather strange way of going about it.
She abandoned her little
erotic reverie and
returned to the real world, to the face and hands of the art critic
with whom
she had shared most of her body and a good part of her mind in unbroken
fidelity these past eight months. She
could tell that he was gradually coming to the point, gradually
extending his
caresses beyond the confines of her thigh and the sartorial barriers of
her
public modesty. But not yet, alas, had
he arrived at that point, preliminary to the ultimate one, where he was
fully
committed to her body and conscious of nothing else!
There was still something which made it
necessary for him to draw out his petting as long as possible. Perhaps all the wine he had drunk at
"So who did you introduce
Keith to
after our little group broke up?" she nonchalantly inquired of her
lover.
Thurber looked surprised. "Didn't you see?" he exclaimed.
"I was too busy talking with
Yvette," she confessed.
"Oh, well, as a matter of
fact I was
on the point of introducing him to Colin Patmore
when
Paul Fleshman came wandering over and
thrust himself
upon us," the art critic explained.
"He wanted to talk, curiously, about his latest exhibition at
the Fairborne Gallery, and hoped that, if
I was intending to
review it for
"And what, if anything, did
Keith
Logan have to say to him?" Greta asked.
"For once, believe it or
not, I
did most
of the talking," Thurber answered, "so he didn't overtax his
voice. Other than being keen to discover
what kind of an artist Fleshman was, he
contented
himself with listening to what we had to say to each other and
savouring the
taste of his beer. As it happened, he
was rather relieved to learn that Fleshman's
art is
mostly abstract, and duly accepted an invitation to attend the
exhibition with
me next week, when it opens. It should
be interesting to hear what he has to say about it - assuming he'll
turn
up."
"Hmm, so it should," Greta
murmured and, with a sudden impatience for the subject of art, she
nestled-up
still closer to Thurber and ran her hand through his wiry hair,
thereupon
causing him to renew his assault upon her modesty with greater resolve
than
before. It was now becoming increasingly
apparent to her that he was approaching that point where parties,
novelists,
artists, exhibitions, and art criticisms counted as nothing, and only
the lure
of her flesh mattered. In another minute
she would find herself deprived of even the last rather flirtatious
vestiges of
her modesty, as he tore the remaining clothes from her and forcibly,
almost
brutally, thrust himself upon her in a frenzy of obsessive carnality. She would have ceased to be the decorous lady
and become, instead, the indecorous whore - to her considerable relief!
CHAPTER
THREE
It
was
somewhat
later than usual when, the following Sunday morning, Edward
Hurst
arrived down to breakfast and, with a faint air of embarrassment,
greeted his
wife and the one guest who had remained overnight, that being the tall,
thin,
dark-haired thirty-seven-year-old by name of Colin Patmore,
who
had
at one time been a literary critic but was now, like his
bleary-eyed
brother-in-law, the chief editor of a monthly arts periodical based in
London's
West End. He had been speaking to his
elder sister of the ups-and-downs of this periodical prior to
"Feeling any better this
morning?" he asked, as the latecomer took a seat at the opposite end of
the small rectangular table and, before his wife could do anything,
proceeded
to pour himself a cup of black coffee.
"Slightly,"
"It was really rather silly
of you to
have drunk so much wine, wasn't it?" scolded Valerie Hurst, who looked
completely refreshed by her night's sleep.
"Well, I suppose I must have
got
carried away," her husband responded, as he gently sipped the steaming
contents of his cup.
"Which is a thing we all do
from time
to time," Patmore sympathized, smiling.
"Oh, really?" Patmore
exclaimed, holding back the uneaten part of a slice of thickly buttered
toast
which he had been about to put into his ravenous mouth.
"I'm afraid I must confess to having
been similarly saddled with the asshole later on, and by no less a
person than
the little scoundrel in question."
"Ah well, perhaps you can
understand
how I felt about the matter last night," said
Valerie Hurst poured
herself, Patmore declining, a third cup of
tea - tea being her
preference to coffee - and confessed to not having had the dubious
privilege of
being drawn into conversation with the man herself.
"All I can remember is answering the door
to him when he arrived," she lightly concluded.
"It would have been better
had you not
admitted him!" her husband asseverated with an air of outraged
innocence. "He hadn't come to enter
into the party spirit. Only to defy and
override it." There was an
anguished pause while
Colin Patmore
smiled a shade patronizingly, and then said:
"Fortunately, he didn't have much to say on that subject to me,
but
contented himself, instead, with discussing literature and the arts, in
accordance with his apparent capacity as an avant-garde novelist. He was of the opinion that any art form which
doesn't reflect our growing allegiance to the superconscious
is essentially anachronistic or reactionary."
"Well, I take it you won't
be inviting
Thurber to any future parties you may throw," Patmore
deduced, swallowing the rest of his toast.
"Not if he brings people
like that
here again, I won't!"
"Really?"
"Oh yes, quite easily!"
"Yes, you may be right," Patmore conceded, nodding vaguely.
"Though, as you well know, I have more
experience of literary critics myself, and there doesn't seem to be too
many of
those
around - at least, not good ones.
But supposing you do drop him, he'll still be able to find
himself an
alternative publication, won't he?"
It was really meant as a
rhetorical
question, but
"Isn't his girlfriend a
journalist?" interposed Valerie Hurst inquisitively, pushing her
half-empty cup of mild tea to one side and leaning forwards onto the
table with
fingers crossed in a businesslike manner.
"Yes, but only on a rather
intermittent freelance basis," her husband confirmed.
"She's essentially a short-story writer,
as I thought you knew." And he might
have added something to the effect that she was a rather attractive one
too,
had he not preferred, for his wife's sake, to merely call her good
looks to
mind and momentarily dwell on the possibility of taking sexual
advantage of
them in due course.
Yes, it had indeed been a
pleasure talking
to her prior to Thurber's rude intrusion, one doubtless motivated by a
degree
of jealousy, and he now sincerely regretted that it hadn't lasted
longer. Still, there was always the
possibility they
would meet again sometime and endeavour to renew their
acquaintanceship, even
if on a relatively clandestine basis.
But whether Greta Ryan would have any bearing on Thurber's
immediate
fate was another matter, and not one that he really cared to entertain. After all, he couldn't very well expect her
to take kindly to any intentions he might have to dispense with the
journalistic services of her current lover - assuming the critic really
meant
anything to her. He would certainly have
to make up his mind on that score, indeed he would!
For if he sincerely wanted to avenge himself
on Thurber for the humiliating experiences of the previous evening, not
to
mention this morning's hangover, then he had better resign himself to
sacrificing the possibility of future meetings with the latter's
girlfriend. On the other hand, if he
wanted to see Greta again ...
"... and quite a good
short-story
writer, too," Patmore was saying,
evidently in
response to his brother-in-law's previous comment.
"I've read and published one or two of
her more recent stories."
"Yes, well, it's highly
unlikely that
Thurber would find alternative publication in any literary magazine,"
"I see," said Valerie for no
apparent reason. "But what about Mr
Logan, does he contribute articles to magazines?" The
question
was primarily addressed to her
brother.
"To tell you the truth, I
don't
honestly know," Patmore replied, frowning. "Though if all his writing is
nonsensical or, rather, non-representational, then I rather incline to
doubt
it. After all, what self-respecting
magazine would seriously consider publishing stuff like that? Not mine, at any rate! And,
as
far as I know, it has never been
expected to do so, either."
"And yet he has had
so-called abstract
novels published,"
"Indeed," Patmore
judiciously conceded, his thin brows raised in an appropriate show of
puzzlement. "Evidently by one of
the metropolis' more avant-garde publishers who have a rather poetic
sense of
literary abstraction. Probably a firm
always on the brink of liquidation, like himself. I
mean,
he can't be making that much money
from them, can he?" Which
rhetorical statement was followed, after a short pause, by the
question:
"How many people do you
know
who
read
- if that's the correct word - completely abstract novels?"
"None," the Hursts
replied simultaneously.
"Well, there you are!" said Patmore reassuringly.
"Unless he gets a subsidy from the Arts Council or has some
private
means that we don't know about ..."
"Or also writes less
unconventionally
for some periodical, possibly under a pseudonym which none of us has
ever heard
of," Valerie suggested.
"Yes, that's always
possible," Patmore conceded, nodding
vaguely and even a shade
regretfully. "After all, if he can
still talk sense, there's no reason for us to suppose that he can't
also write
it, if circumstances oblige."
"Sense?"
There was a titter of
disrespectful
laughter from
"Exactly what I think"
"It takes a brave man to do
such a
thing," Patmore opined.
"Either that or a lunatic."
"Well, you can guess what he
is,"
Once again, to the
accompaniment of a
further titter of disrespectful laughter from Valerie Hurst, a faint
sigh
emerged from Colin Patmore.
"Yes, so I was led to believe from a few
educative words the novelist had with me," he ironically declared. "Perhaps that explains why Christianity
is no longer as influential as formerly, bearing in mind the
diminishing status
of the subconscious, and hence of the Devil and all his followers. The concept of Hell no longer inspires any
great fear in the great majority of people because it has ceased to
correspond
to a major psychological reality, ceased to dominate our consciousness
to the
extent it must have done when mankind was more psychologically balanced
between
the dark and the light."
"Bah! You sound as though
you actually
believe it,"
"Well, to a degree I suppose
I
do," Patmore confessed, blushing slightly,
"insofar as it is
generally true to say that we no
longer go in any great fear of Hell. The
question then presents itself - are we therefore prepared to take the
concept
of Heaven more seriously, and, if so, can it be deemed compatible with
a belief
in some utopian millennium of a post-human order?"
"But I thought you didn't
approve of
that?" Valerie objected.
"I don't," her brother
confirmed.
"Yet, presumably, you're
still
prepared to give more credence to Heaven,"
"Only when it's equated with
a kind of
posthumous Clear Light, as in the context advocated by Aldous
Huxley," admitted Patmore with an
affirmative
nod.
"Ah, but that's precisely
what Mr
Logan wouldn't approve of!"
"And would doubtless think
poorly of
anyone who didn't," Valerie Hurst confidently surmised in the swift
wake
of her husband's retort.
"Well, he can think what he
bloody-well likes," said Patmore sternly. "But I, for one, have no sympathy with
the idea. To me, an afterlife in which
some kind of spiritual salvation is possible seems a more feasible, not
to say
tolerable, conjecture than an evolutionary climax of indefinite
spiritual bliss
being posited as occurring at sometime in the distant future."
"Ditto for me,"
"Not very flattering to our
egos, is
it?" Patmore deduced, frowning
characteristically.
"Quite," his host
sympathized,
with a vaguely reproachful nod.
"But, curiously, Mr Logan would seem to be a little less
egocentric
than us, a little further ahead of us along the path of evolution, as
it were,
and thus not quite so upset by the likelihood that salvation, when and
if it
comes, will only come to those who are at the end of the path rather
than to
those who, like ourselves, are approximately at the half-way stage or
maybe a
little beyond that."
"You mean he has proletarian
leanings," Patmore inferred, letting the
ideological cat out of the bourgeois bag in which posthumous salvation
complacently slumbered, to the detriment of millennial futurity.
"So it would appear,"
The guest smiled knowingly. "Well, maybe that explains why he didn't
quite enter into the spirit of your party last night," he opined,
offering
each of the
"Which, to all appearances,
he
damn-well succeeded in doing!"
"Have another black coffee,"
his
wife dutifully advised him, noticing the empty cup in front of his
plate.
"Yes, I think I'd better,"
he
meekly agreed, accepting her suggestion without demur.
CHAPTER
FOUR
As
arranged
in
advance, Keith Logan met Martin Thurber outside the Fairborne
Gallery in the Strand and, stepping through its revolving glass doors,
they
paid the requisite entrance fee at a nearby kiosk and calmly proceeded
in the
general direction of the exhibition, which, despite the early hour, was
already
attracting a fair amount of critical attention.
"Have you ever been here
before?"
Thurber asked, as they respectfully approached the inner sanctum.
"Well, as you'll see, there
are two
rooms here, and Paul Fleshman is
exhibiting in one of
them," the art critic revealed.
"Who's in the second?"
"A younger and less
controversial
artist by name of Joseph Philpott, whose
works we
shall also be viewing."
They had arrived at the
larger of the two
rooms, in which a cross-section of Fleshman's
work
now reposed and, one behind the other, the two friends stepped into its
brightly lit interior, where at least twenty people were already
viewing the
various exhibits.
"Ah!" cried Thurber, who was
positively dazzled by the profusion of lights.
"Just as I had expected!"
"It's almost like walking
into an Ivres Klein void," opined
"Quite," the critic
confirmed. "Except that, with Fleshman, there's something in it - as you can
see."
Almost immediately, they
came to a halt in
front of a large abstract canvas on which thousands of tiny silver
points
glistened and sparkled in the bright light, like the powdered-tinsel
decoration
on certain Christmas cards. It appeared
to be alive, as one moved slightly to-and-fro in front of it, with tiny
insects, so unstable was the surface texture.
Towards its centre the glitter of the tightly-packed silver
points was
more intense than elsewhere, suggesting some kind of heart or cynosure.
"Evidently one of his new
optical
experiments," Thurber observed, extracting a blue notebook and biro
from
his jacket pocket and proceeding to jot down its title, 'Dazzle 3', to
which he
added a brief outline of the work and a few terse comments.
"It's pleasingly
transcendental,"
"Quite," the critic
acknowledged,
and he scribbled down 'pleasingly transcendental' in his notebook. "Not inclined to glorify the
subconscious, at any rate."
Before long they moved on,
past another
viewer, to the next exhibit, which was hung about four yards farther
along the
same wall and seemed to undulate as they approached it.
Composed, in the main, of closely-knit wavy
black stripes on a white ground, the stripes becoming sharper and more
closely
packed towards the centre, this work was distinctly reminiscent of
Bridget
Riley and Jeffery Steele, being more traditionally Op than the previous
one. It took longer to properly come to
life too,
yet when it did succeed in giving rise to visual hallucinations of a
predetermined character, the overall effect was much more interesting,
with
greater tonal shifts and more radical undulations.
Thurber again scribbled down the title, 'Forcefield
R', in his notebook and added a few brief
descriptive notes.
"One of his more
traditionally optical
experiments," he remarked, moving his large head gently backwards and
forwards in front of it from a distance of about three yards. "Primarily focusing on heat rather than
light energy, on movement rather than dazzle.
A little outmoded perhaps, but a competent grasp of optical
techniques
all the same. What d'you
think of it, Keith?"
"To be sure!" the critic
agreed,
nodding sagely. "I know exactly
what you mean." And he immediately
scribbled 'would rather it gave off more light' in his notebook.
However, the particular
species of Op Art
to which Fleshman had paid passing tribute
in his 'Forcefield R' was succeeded, in due
course, by a large
circular project, hung against the white wall at a height of about four
feet
from the ground, which appeared to radiate colours from its centre in a
manner
reminiscent of Peter Sedgley and Wojcieck
Fangor.
Standing in front of it the two men beheld a small, intensely
bright
globe of white paint surrounded by a slender band of yellow paint,
which was
surrounded, in turn, by a broad band of
red paint, this latter duly surrounded by a slender band of blue paint
- the
total composition somewhat reminiscent of an archery target. Overall, the effect wasn't particularly
optic, though the small central globe could be seen to expand and
contract as
one stared at it over a period of 30-60 seconds, producing an
hallucination of
colour shift as the white expanded into the yellow and that, in turn,
influenced the red to change into orange, with a corresponding
transformation
in the blue ring to mauve or purple, depending how long one stared at
it.
Thurber dutifully noted the
title and
scribbled a few complementary notes.
"One gets more light from this one, don't you think?" he
commented,
focusing his attention on the bright globe in the middle.
"Certainly," Logan admitted. "Although he might have made more of the
white paint, had he wanted to create a stronger light-equivalence from
it. He seems to be more interested in
colour and
the fusings or clashings
which result from their juxtaposition."
"Yes, that could well be the
case," Thurber conceded, blushing slightly as, disdaining further
curiosity, he led the way along to the next exhibit, which, like the
previous
one, also took a circular form.
"But what of this one here, the central globe of which is so
much
bigger and the overall effect so much brighter?" he remarked.
True, and it was with this
exhibit that
True, it might be something
of an
exaggeration to contend that we were already as biased towards the superconscious as this painting, with its
commanding white
globe, could have led one to infer. But
the fact nevertheless remained that the imbalance it signified had a
certain
relevance to us which could only be heightened in the course of time,
as we
grew progressively more transcendental.
As a religious or psychological work, it undoubtedly possessed
the
qualities of insightful leadership one expected from genuine art. To push it further into the future, however,
the artist need simply expand the white globe's circumference at the
expense of
the black band by another inch or two, in order to signify an even
greater
degree of spiritual progress and thus attain to a still more radical
manifestation of such leadership.... Though, of course, to get rid of
the black
band altogether would indeed be to point towards the post-human
millennium, if
at the risk of making one's art too forward-looking, at this juncture
in time,
to be properly intelligible to the general or, indeed, specialist
public.
But irrespective of whether
or not, in
doing what he did, Fleshman had aspired to
spiritual
leadership, the resulting impression it created on Logan certainly
wasn't
without relevance to his theories of psychic evolution, but, on the
contrary,
more than adequately confirmed them. As
long as the black continued to recede and the white to expand,
everything was
going according to plan. The post-human
millennium would come about eventually.
"Yes, I can't help but admire this work," he proclaimed, as he
stood next to the scribbling critic and continued to gaze, as though
entranced,
into the acrylic lustre of its indisputable cynosure.
"It automatically marks Fleshman
out as a major artist."
"Indeed!" Thurber concurred,
nodding deferentially. "I've always
thought highly of his abilities, though more especially so during the
past
couple of years, when he has matured so much.... Not that he doesn't
have his
lapses from time to time, as I think we've already seen.
But at least the general direction of his
creativity tends increasingly towards the transcendent."
"As this painting
well-attests,"
"Quite so!" the critic
seconded,
and, quick to exploit the most apt phrase, he scribbled down the latter
part of
his companion's statement, underlining the fact that it referred to the
exhibit
'White on Black'.
They had got to the end of
the first wall
by now and were obliged to proceed in the direction of those works
which lined
the second one or, as in the case of a couple of larger exhibits of a
vaguely
sculptural appearance, stood just in front of it. The
thirty
or so viewers of as many
persuasions who had entered the gallery ahead of them had been
augmented, in
the meantime, to more than twice that number, with a consequence that
the
viewing of exhibits was not quite as straightforward a matter now as
formerly,
owing to the groups and even queues which formed in front of everything. Nevertheless, with a little ruthless
determination, one could still obtain a fairly advantageous viewpoint
if one so
desired, and it was precisely with a mind to obtaining such a viewpoint
that
the critic and his viewing companion elbowed their way to the front of
the next
exhibit - a kinetic-styled work with a distinctively moiré,
or watery, background, above which three coloured plastic circles of
slightly
different sizes appeared to hover at indeterminate distances from the
bright
background, thus causing the viewer some difficulty in establishing the
actual
perspective before him.
"Undoubtedly revealing
Soto's
influence," Thurber opined, going up closer to the work in order to get
a
better look at the moiré
background in question.
"Except that where Soto uses squares and rectangles, our hero
has
opted for the circle. Nevertheless, the
result obtained is not without kinetic merit.
There is still a flickering of sorts, isn't there?"
With an affirmative grunt,
"Yes, the circles tend to
float in the
air at different distances from the background - the black one seeming,
on
account of the tendency of black to recede, the closest to it, while
the white
one appears to be floating towards us, and the red ... lies somewhere
in-between," Thurber estimated.
"Rather effective, don't you think?" He
backed
away a few paces and took another
critical squint at it. However, someone
who had been standing in front of an exhibit to the right suddenly
moved across
to the left and interrupted his view. He
had no option, therefore, but to move in the opposite direction, which
duly
took him to a position in front of another Soto-inspired relief, this
time one
in which the moiré
background, rather than serving to heighten the illusion
of indeterminate spatial relationships between flickering circles
suspended in
front of it, served instead to optically disintegrate the thin,
vertical metal
rods which stood in their place, thus causing the entire surface to
shimmer and
quiver as though dissolved in a faint, ethereal mist of nebulous light. Akin in substance to Soto's Vibrating
Structures, the work nonetheless exhibited certain phenomena not
characteristic of that master, the most prominent being the division of
the moiré
background into gold and silver horizontal strips, some ten in all,
which had
an effect of intensifying the vibration or flickering obtained through
the
viewer's movement. In addition to this,
there was the division of the vertically-suspended steel rods into two
or more
different colours, thus producing variations in the vibration-illusion
which
corresponded to the nature and tone of each individual colour, and
further
complicating the indeterminate spatial relationships which existed
between each
of the differently-coloured metal rods in relation to the moiré
background and, last but hardly least, the work as a whole in relation
to its
viewer. For example, in the case of the
first rod on the left of the line, the white segment appeared to detach
itself
from the rest of the rod and to subtly approach the viewer, all the
time
vibrating in response to the moiré background, while the black
segment
tended, by contrast, to recede from him, creating the illusion of a
separate
rod - a procedure which was utilized on each of the ten rods either
with further
black-and-white divisions along their lengths or with the use of
various other
colours, including pink, orange, violet, red, yellow, and brown, each
with its
own vibration and spatial tendency.
"Rather complex, don't you think?" the critic thoughtfully
concluded, after he had experimented with a variety of head and body
movements
in front of the relief, and this in spite of the close proximity of
other
viewers and the inevitable consequence of one or two minor cranial
collisions.
"Indeed!"
"So it is!" Thurber
confirmed,
going up to a position opposite
"Quite," the critic
concurred,
briefly inspecting the closely-packed horizontal strips in question. And, once again, he made judicious use of his
notebook.
There were, however, one or
two other
exhibits in the immediate vicinity to view and, despite the general
crush to
get at them, it was towards these that the two art lovers now advanced,
momentarily shielding their eyes from the dazzling diffusion of light
being emitted
by the exhibits in question. For there,
no more than four yards from the second relief, stood the first of two
kinetic
light-sculptures which attested to the influence, as
"Another surprise for me, I
must
admit," Thurber confessed, as he approached the nearest exhibit - a
cube-shaped arrangement of fluorescent construction in which some
twenty tubes
of equal length though, in the main, unequal diameter shone with a
variety of
intensities, some slightly less forcefully than others.
"A lot of phosphor for the
electrons
to bombard,"
"Rather puzzling, isn't it?"
Thurber declared, before scribbling down 'Light Variation 7' in his
pocket-sized notebook. "It must
cost a bloody fortune to run."
"You think Maholy-Nagy
would be impressed, then?" the critic joked, referring to the
father-figure and most consistent early practitioner of the genre.
"At least he'd be gratified
that light
is being given the importance it deserves," Logan conjectured, turning
away from the work in question and approaching its counterpart, which
stood at
a relatively safe remove in an ambience of its own and shone not with
varying
degrees of white light but with a variety of different-coloured lights
which
issued from the variegated tints of its individual tubes.
Not only was each tube in this cube-like
composition tinted a different colour but, as in the case of the metal
rods on
the kinetic relief, it was tinted from 2-5 different colours, making
for a
correspondingly more complex and intriguing, not to say mind-boggling,
overall
effect! Thus at its most simple level,
one tube might be equally divisible between red and blue light and be
positioned vertically opposite a tube with blue and red divisions, so
as to
emphasize colour contrast. Whilst, at
its most complex level, a tube might be equally divisible into red,
white,
yellow, black, and blue segments, and be positioned horizontally
opposite a
tube with these colours in reverse, or some such contrasting
arrangement, which
gave rise to a much more puzzling and altogether intriguing
relationship. Depending on one's
vantage-point, it seemed
as though the lights were either trying to break away from one another,
as in
the examples emphasizing contrast, or to approach and mingle with one
another,
as in the examples where complementary colours had been juxtaposed or,
alternatively, placed in parallel positions - the overall effect being
a slight
displacement of the tubular cube through colour, as though indicative
of the
triumph of mind over matter, of truth over beauty.
"Hmm, quite an interesting
concept," he resumed, after his preliminary investigations of the
colour
relationships had run their technical course.
"The interplay of so many different colours is most effective,
even
given the blurs and violent disharmonies which occasionally result. It's rather like Abstract Expressionism in a
way, albeit the use of light rather than paint sharply distinguishes it
from
painterly precedent."
"Yes, and also the fact of
its kinetic
potential," Thurber averred, warming, in turn, to the spatial
displacements on view. In fact, the
clash and fusion of so many different colours made him feel dizzy,
obliging him
to avert his gaze and grope for psychological support in his notebook. Yet there were so many after-images in his
mind from the glare of the fluorescent lights that he couldn't see the
page he
was intending to write on properly, and had to abandon it before he had
so much
as scribbled a single word there. His
mind was fairly aflame with vibrant colours, some of which were more
elongated
than others, almost causing him to lose his physical balance and tumble
to the
floor. Fortunately, however, Logan was
on hand to support him with arm at the ready, and together they slowly
made
their way through the crowd towards the next exhibits, which were
arranged
along the wall opposite the one their attention had been drawn to when
first
entering the gallery. Here, to the
critic's optical relief, the exhibits were mainly Op, and consequently
less
dazzling than the coloured and plain lights already encountered; though
it was
some time before the last of the glaring after-images completely
disappeared
from his mind and he was accordingly able to give them his undivided
attention. "Not wavy stripes or large
circles this
time, is it?" he observed, swaying slightly backwards-and-forwards amid
the jostling throng of fellow-viewers.
"Indeed not," confirmed
Logan,
who cast an appreciative gaze over the nearest of the four canvases
which lined
the third wall, its hundreds of tiny black-and-white squares arranged
in
contrasting areas of light and shade, suggestive of certain works by Morellet and Schmidt - notably the former's
Aleatoric
Distribution, 1961, and the latter's Programmed
Squares II, 1967.
"It's simply amazing how
much thematic
and tonal variation can be obtained from the simplest elements,"
Thurber
remarked, as though to himself.
"How seemingly infinite are the creative possibilities inherent
in
such a form! Even the placing of
slightly different-sized white squares on a black ground, or the
alternative
arrangement of different-sized black squares on a white one, produces
countless
tonal and graphic changes."
"Absolutely," said
"A thing, presumably, which
you find
less satisfactory?" Thurber inferred, simultaneously scribbling down
the
relevant information in his, by now, image-free notebook.
"Only to the extent that I
personally
prefer works with an emphasis on light-equivalence,"
"Perfectly," admitted the
critic,
who quickly led the way towards the next exhibit - a similar cube-based
work
which, with the incorporation of small circles, was indeed more
reminiscent of Vasarely - and, following a
brief deferential pause in
front of it, on again towards the remaining two canvases lining the
wall, the
first of which was pretty much a conventional zebra-striped abstract,
whilst
its neighbour, composed of thousands of tiny tinsel-like points which
sparkled
in the gallery's neon glare as one moved backwards and forwards in
front of it,
reminded them of the first exhibit they had seen. Unlike
its
companion piece opposite, however,
this exhibit was tinted gold and seemed to Thurber the more impressive
of the
two, especially with regard to the star-like radiance which appeared to
emanate
from the centre and to spread its dazzling rays beyond the edges of the
canvas
- a strongly centrifugal tendency about which
However, if natural
light-equivalence was
what the artist had in mind here, then with the last exhibit on display
one was
brought very conclusively back to the realm of artificial light, and on
no less
a scale than a work composed entirely of slender neon tubing, which was
attached to a hardboard base reaching to the height and stretching
almost the
width of the final wall. On this
hardboard base, the neon tubing had been curled and twisted in every
conceivable direction, some of it forming small patterns of surprising
complexity, some of it winding through larger patterns which covered as
much as
two-thirds of the total space, but all of it contributing to an overall
impression of unity and harmony of design - the pink tubing no less
than the
light-blue, the white no less than the green, the red no less than the
yellow.
"Sheer magic!" Thurber
exclaimed,
as soon as the initial shock of encountering something that bore more
than a
passing resemblance to
"Yes, this is definitely the
most
transcendental work we've encountered this morning,"
"I entirely agree," said
Thurber,
who immediately scribbled down a few lines about Gyorgy
Kepes and the long-established tradition of
light
murals and associated works. "The
fusion of art and technology has really blossomed during the last few
decades,
hasn't it?"
"Not only blossomed, but
acquired the
recognition it so richly deserves - certainly as far as the more
enlightened
elements of society are concerned," said
A few nearby heads had
turned in curiosity
or bemusement, as
Be that as it may, the task
of reviewing
this room's contents had now been attended to, so he was free to take
his leave
of it and conduct
"Quite so," Thurber
concurred,
coming to a sudden standstill not far from the entrance to the second
room. "His work is really rather
eclectic, isn't it?"
"He's certainly very
versatile,"
"No, that's quite true," the
critic confirmed, with a thoughtful nod.
"At least, not in the exhibition we've just seen.
Though he does paint representational works
from time to time when the fancy takes him.
But the artist we're about to view in this second room is far
less
abstract on the whole, if what I've already seen of his work in the
past is any
indication. So are you still interested
in coming in or ...?"
"Excellent!" Thurber
exclaimed. "Then let's get on with
it right away." And with that
settled, they boldly entered the second gallery.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Greta
Ryan
pulled
herself up sharp and stared unbelievingly at the rear view of
the tall,
silver-haired man not ten yards away. He
was buying a newspaper from a pavement vendor and stood proudly erect
in front
of the cream kiosk on which lay the afternoon edition of the Evening
Standard. Attired in a dark-blue suit with
a pointed
umbrella perched on his arm, he looked altogether suave and
businesslike, quite
a contrast, in fact, to how he had seemed the last time Greta saw him. For, even without a full facial view, the
hair and height of the man revealed that he was none other than Edward
Hurst,
editor-in-chief of 'Art and Artist'.
Undecided what to do, Greta
remained locked
where she stood, intently staring at the all-too-recognizable figure in
front
of her. She wondered whether she oughtn't
to quickly turn round and proceed at the double in the opposite
direction; for
she was afraid that if he noticed her he would detain and bore her with
his
conversation. But there was something
else on Greta's mind which prevented her from immediately taking
flight, and it
was the recollection of what she feared
Yet it was her own
self-interest that
seemed to be winning out, getting the better of her concern for
Thurber,
reminding her of the conceited bore that Edward Hurst actually was. Although she couldn't bring herself to turn
completely about and walk back from whence she had come, she was just
on the
point of turning to the right and making a belated effort to cross over
the
busy main road when, as though by psychic intuition or telepathic
pre-warning,
Hurst paid for his paper and turned towards her, spotting her
immediately among
the dense throng of fellow-pedestrians.
He raised his folded paper in recognition and advanced towards
her. Her heart sank slightly, but, all the
same,
she was secretly relieved that the crisis had been resolved, the
indecision
rectified. She faked a smile.
"What a pleasant surprise!"
Greta paid him the
compliment of a faint
blush. "Oh, in what way?" she
daringly inquired.
"Oh, pleasantly enough," he
replied, beginning to feel a trifle hot under his starched collar. "Yes, I was wondering when I would have
the pleasure of seeing you again."
"I see," Greta responded,
feigning another smile. "Well, it
just goes to show what a small world it is."
"Indeed,"
Greta would have preferred
to say business,
but with the large plastic carrier bag in her hand and the desire still
bubbling under the surface of her mind to find out more about his
attitude
towards Thurber, she replied: "Just pleasure. Or,
rather,
the desire to buy myself some new
clothes, including a dress."
"Which is presumably what
you've just
bought?"
"Right."
"And what are you intending
to do
next?" he asked, smiling.
She hesitated on the brink
of speech, not quite
knowing how best to answer. Should she
tell him that she was on her way home?
She couldn't think of an alternative at present, and, besides,
it
corresponded to the truth. So she
admitted as much to him.
"Splendid!"
"Well, if you're sure it's
no
inconvenience," Greta murmured through clenched teeth, "I'd
appreciate some company." Which was
considerably less than true, though she could hardly say so!
Within a couple of minutes
they were seated
together on the back seat of a taxi, heading away from the crowded West
End
streets, and before half-an-hour had elapsed it duly arrived at Greta's
East
Finchley address where, in response to certain crude hints from Hurst
about
having plenty of time to spare, she invited him indoors.
In a sense she didn't have much option, since
he was on the pavement ahead of her and offering to carry the large
carrier bag
to her door, which, despite nominal objections on her part, he duly
did; though
not before paying their fare and dismissing the taxi into the bargain. To have left him stranded on the doorstep
would not, in the circumstances, have been the most polite or ladylike
thing to
do! So, resignedly, she unlocked the
front door and, together, they entered her flat.
"Ah, how pleasantly clean
and
bright!" Hurst exclaimed, as soon as he had stepped across the
threshold
of her living room, which faced onto the passageway leading from the
front
door. "Especially after having been
cooped-up in a stuffy old cab."
She acknowledged this fact
with another
fake smile and motioned him to take a seat.
He was content to avail himself of the room's velvet settee and
did so
with an almighty sigh of relief, resting her carrier bag against the
leg of a
nearby coffee table. Then he watched her
activate a small electric fire to his left and take off her light-brown
coat. He could sense that his presence
made her slightly nervous, so hastened to break the silence with a word
of
admiration for her pale floral-patterned dress, which he considered
very
tasteful.
"Thank you," she responded,
unable to prevent herself from blushing faintly at this frank reference
to her
sartorial appearance. For it was one of
the dresses she didn't ordinarily wear in the presence of men, being,
from
Thurber's viewpoint, too gay and seductive.
Its low neckline and gentle flounce, coupled to the partial
transparency
of its thin gauzy material, would have met with his public disapproval. She would have been insufficiently the
lady. But today she wasn't in his
presence, nor had she arranged to meet him, so what she wore was
entirely her
own affair. And because she wanted a
change, she had opted for one of her sexier dresses.
"I'm surprised you didn't
wear
something like that to my party the other evening,"
"Yes, I was rather formal,
wasn't
I?" she admitted, becoming more embarrassed. "I
didn't
really know what your party
would look like."
"Not to worry," he
apologetically
rejoined. "You looked delightful
anyway."
She faked yet another smile
and offered to
fetch him a non-alcoholic drink, since she didn't keep alcohol indoors. He agreed to a coffee, so she took herself
off to the kitchen to make it, including one for herself.
This respite from him came as something of a
relief and enabled her to gather her thoughts together.
She was more than ever convinced that she
disliked him and had made a serious mistake in not turning around in
the street
and walking away while the opportunity still prevailed.
It was fairly obvious that he intended to
have his way with her, no less by the unabashedly flattering tone of
his
conversation than by his crude insistence on accompanying her indoors. His attitude towards her at the party had
been friendly and, to say the least, admiring, in spite of his wife's
proximity. No doubt, he hoped to
consolidate what he had gained there by a fresh onslaught of admiration
here,
since he clearly wouldn't have gone out of his way to accompany her for
any
other reason. And she?
What could she do to resist him? Was
there
anything? No, it didn't seem so. Willy-nilly, he would probably succeed in his
objectives. Yet if she was destined to
be had by him, there was at least the possibility that it could take
place on
certain terms - terms assuring her that no action would be taken
against
Thurber if the editor got it in mind to dispense with his reviews. Yes, there was always that
possibility; though she had no proof, as yet, that he actually did have
such an
action in mind. Perhaps she would soon
find out?
Having done what there was
to do in the
kitchen, plus a couple of additional things besides, she returned to
the living
room with tray in-hand and set it down on the small coffee table in
front of
the settee, sitting down, at the same time, on the space Hurst had at
the last
moment provided for her. "Help
yourself to sugar," she advised him, as he reached forwards to take his
mug.
"Gladly," he responded with
facetious self-assurance.
She noticed, as he
straightened up again,
that he had in the meantime taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. Close-up he was apt to appear younger than at
a distance, despite his silver-grey hair.
He couldn't have been more than fifty.
"Hmm, that's better!" he
remarked, sipping the coffee into which he had put two large
teaspoonfuls of
brown sugar. "I really needed
it."
Despite the fact that she
was a grown woman
of twenty-four, she felt curiously shy and insecure beside him, almost
childish. He was more than old enough to
be her father and she sensed something of a father/daughter
relationship in his
company.
"Yes, I like this room," he
declared
after a minute's steady sipping, during which time his eyes had
embraced its
contours and visible contents.
"It's very cosy." He
eased back in the settee and turned towards her. "So
this
is where you do your writing, I
presume?"
"Well, in actual fact I have
another
room to write in," she confessed, momentarily abandoning her coffee. "This is more a place to relax in."
"So it is."
He smiled appreciatively. "And do
you usually relax here alone or
in the company of another?" he asked.
"Both," she replied,
blushing
anew.
"Usually," Greta admitted,
"though I also have one or two other friends."
"Not bed friends, by any
chance?"
"No, just friends," said
Greta,
who continued to sip her coffee, more than ever conscious of her
shyness and
insecurity beside him.
"I imagine you must be quite
fond of
Thurber," he murmured, following a brief pause.
"Yes, I am actually."
Greta averted her face from
his gaze and
buried it in the coffee. She didn't
quite know how best to answer that question.
"Well," she at length replied, suddenly mindful of what
Thurber had told her about him, "I suppose fondness wouldn't be the
exact
word where he's concerned."
"I should think not!"
Greta was hardly surprised
or shocked to
hear this, and merely commented: "Presumably because of what he said
and
the authoritative way in which he said it?"
"Yes, and also the time he
took in
saying it,"
"I'm sorry to hear that, but
Martin
didn't really know all that much about the man in the first place,"
Greta
remarked.
"Then, damn it, he shouldn't
have
invited him at all!" cried Hurst, who was no longer the shameless
flatterer but, clearly, the outraged innocent, the offended host, the
affronted
bourgeois.
"No, I guess not," she
responded,
briefly turning towards him in spite of her private disgust with his
want of
self-control.
"As it happened, I had one
of the
worst nights of my entire life," he averred, "and a frightful
hangover the next day!"
"I'm awfully sorry to hear
that,"
Greta repeated, though she was far from sure what the frightful
hangover could
have to do with her boyfriend or, indeed, with Keith Logan. Still, it was pretty evident that Hurst
wanted to stew in his own misery a while, to arouse her sympathy and,
if
possible, make her feel guilty, share in the responsibility for his
suffering, and
thereby obligate her to propitiate him in due course.
It was an excellent way of softening her up,
and she could hardly fail, under the circumstances, to respond to it. Pushed a little further, she would have no
option
but to console him, to extend her feminine sympathy to his body, even
given the
fact of her childish insecurity beside him.
"Yes, well, I dare say you'd
be even
sorrier to hear that I'm now considering whether to dispense with
Thurber's
contributions to my magazine, in consequence of what he directly and
indirectly
inflicted upon me the other night," Hurst continued, renewing his
attack.
It was just as Greta had
expected, but she
did her best to feign alarm.
"Seriously?" she cried, this time giving him the privilege of
her undivided attention, as though the matter were of supreme concern
to her.
"Perfectly," he assured her,
nodding curtly.
"Indeed, I am sorry to hear
that!" she confessed, and, as though in confirmation of the fact,
immediately returned her half-empty mug of coffee to the tray in front
of them,
since its presence in her hand seemed somewhat irrelevant to the
serious
matters under discussion. It was a
gesture, curiously, that must have impressed
"Well, I don't quite
honestly see why
I should continue to befriend Thurber when he has quite obviously
ceased to
befriend me," the editor complained with rhetorical relish. "He deserves to be punished somehow, and
I intend, before the week is out, to damn-well punish him!"
Greta had more than an
inkling of how Hurst
really intended to punish or, rather, avenge himself upon her
boyfriend, but
she couldn't very well let-on at that moment.
Instead, she pleaded with him not to drop Thurber's
contributions, since
they were his chief source of income at present and greatest pride in
life. She pleaded with all the feminine
tact and guile at her disposal, reminding Hurst that this very week -
indeed,
that very day - Martin Thurber was at work in the service of 'Art and
Artist',
reviewing an exhibition of one of the finest contemporary artists, an
artist
known to the editor personally, as his presence at Saturday evening's
party had
adequately confirmed, and someone, moreover, who would undoubtedly be
glad of
the critical appreciation of one of the country's foremost art critics
-
indeed, if academic and artistic opinion were to be believed, the
foremost
art
critic
of his day, a direct descendant, as it were, of the great
twentieth-century tradition of British art critics and historians ...
from Roger
Fry and Clive Bell to Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark.
Surely the editor couldn't fail to appreciate
the importance of the services rendered to his periodical by such a
knowledgeable and tasteful critic?
But
"As, however, for Martin
Thurber -
yes, he's undoubtedly a competent critic, though I would seriously
hesitate to
place him in the front rank,"
"Oh?" Once
again
Greta was obliged to feign
surprise for something she had anticipated all along.
Deep down she really loathed him!
He drew himself closer to
her and rested
his arm on the back of the settee, just behind her head.
"Maybe we could come to some sort of
arrangement together which would, ahem, render it unnecessary for me to
consider Saturday evening to have been entirely wasted?"
"What kind of an
arrangement?"
Greta innocently inquired of him, blushing slightly in response to his
intimate
proximity.
He ran his other hand over
her cheek and
softly caressed her neck, smiling all the while in an unequivocally
emotional
answer to her question. And just as
emotionally he brought his face closer to hers, peered into her bright
eyes, as
into a crystal ball, and placed a silent kiss on her lips - a kiss
which caused
her to tremble with a mixture of desire and disgust.
God, how she loathed him! And yet,
at the same time and by a curious
paradox, how she secretly yearned to be taken by an older and possibly
more
experienced man, to revel in her helplessness and childish insecurity
before
him! Since she had never been taken by
someone she disliked, she was curious to discover exactly what it would
be
like, to experiment, as it were, with the possible degradation
resulting from
such an unattractive encounter. If, as Aldous Huxley had led her to believe, the urge
to downward
self-transcendence was manifest in sex, would not such an experience
prove even
more self-negating than if indulged in with someone she liked, someone,
for
instance, like Martin Thurber? And would
she not be less the public lady and more the private whore than ever
before? Would not the contrast between
her public and private selves be correspondingly greater, and all the
more
authentic?
Yes, she partly trembled
with disgust at
the touch of his fingers upon her cheek and the pressure of his lips
upon
hers. But not wholly!
For a demon of desire was indeed manifesting
itself in her at that very moment, egging her on to comply with its
lustful
wishes. She knew that it was vain to
protest against this demon, and not least of all because she preferred
to
believe it was in Thurber's interests that she should sacrifice herself
on his
behalf. What he would personally think
of such a sacrifice was quite a different matter, but she chose not to
speculate. Better to give way to the
temptations to-hand ... than wonder whether Martin might not prefer
having his
reviews rejected, to having his girlfriend sexually mauled by the man
who was
intending to reject them.
Absolutely! And as those
temptations were now more pressing than before ...
"You promise not to take any
retributive action against Martin?" she ironically requested of Hurst,
as
he became bolder, drawing himself still closer to her and making a
determined
effort to slide his hand under her dress.
She checked its advance, however, and repeated:
"You promise?"
"Yes, provided you cease to
resist
me!"
Reluctantly she relinquished
her grip on
his hand and it immediately resumed its methodical progress, exposing
her dark-stockinged thighs to his gaze, the
sight of which
considerably emboldened him. For, with
the spectacle of such copious flesh, he ceased to be a gentleman, a
giver of
gentle kisses and caresses, and effectively became, as though by some
Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation, a wild animal intent upon ravaging its
prey as
quickly and ruthlessly as possible. A
deep abyss of carnal sensuality had suddenly opened-up before him and
he now
plunged down into its murky depths, dragging his helpless victim along
with
him. A downward self-transcendence was
certainly in the offing, which promised to be more obliterating than
anything
either of them could have anticipated.
In vain did she implore him
to be gentle
as, wrenching the panties from her groin, he rolled her onto her
stomach,
pushed her dress up her back and, quickly unzipping his flies, released
his
rearing penis from its increasingly strained confines, dropping his
pants as he
grabbed hold of her thighs in order to manoeuvre himself into a rear
entry
position beneath the curvaceous mounds of her alluring buttocks. As he drove himself into her, his hands
reached around to her breasts and took hold of them with a pressure
that
dislodged her brassiere and momentarily distracted her from the pain of
his
phallic assault. Then as this pain was
gradually replaced by a reassuringly familiar numbing sensation and
that, in
turn, by a mounting tension of orgasmic response, she found the last
vestiges
of her ego relapsing further and further into subconscious dominion,
and
completely abandoned herself, beast-like, to the mutual pleasures of
their
flesh. Here was the degradation she had
secretly craved. Now she was really a
whore,
delivered from her self-pity, free-falling in the abyss of sexual
abandon,
irrevocably damned, in worldly submission, to a fiercely lustful
predator!
CHAPTER
SIX
It
was
towards
eight o'clock when, in response to an invitation from Thurber
at the Fairborne Gallery the previous day,
Keith Logan rang the
doorbell to Paul Fleshman's fashionable
Chelsea flat,
to be courteously admitted by a young woman whose face he had first
seen at
Hurst's party, but with whose name he was still unfamiliar.
"Yvette," she duly informed
him,
before inviting him to take off his zipper jacket and hang it by the
door. Then he followed her through the
vestibule
and into an adjoining room, from which a steady stream of conversation
could be
heard. He was flushed and slightly
apprehensive as he stepped into its neon glare.
The three people gathered there simultaneously turned their
attention
upon him.
"Ah, good to see you again!"
Fleshman exclaimed, and, extending a
welcoming hand, the
artist advanced towards him. "We
hoped you'd come."
"Thanks," responded Logan,
who
held out his hand to be shook. "It's an
honour to be here." He visually greeted
Thurber and Greta, who
blushed in the process, and readily accepted the seat offered him in
one of the
room's three leather-upholstered armchairs, opposite the couch on which
the
other two guests were seated.
"Yvette's my girlfriend, in
case you
didn't know,” Fleshman revealed, with a
broad smile.
"Ah yes, I had
surmised
as much,"
"Can I get you something to
drink?" she asked.
"Yes, have what you like,"
insisted the artist, who happened to have a beer in his hand.
"Thanks," said Logan, who
duly
arranged to have a can of cola.
Meanwhile Greta took-in his
appearance with
quiet satisfaction, her gaze ranging over his face and clothes with
subtle
ease. He seemed more handsome than at
Hurst's party, possibly because he was now seen in a better light, that
is to
say, not as a stranger with a fiercely didactic turn-of-mind but as an
acquaintance and admirer - yes, an admirer of herself.
After all, if what Martin had told her about
him was true, she had no reason to suppose that he thought badly of
her,
associating her with Edward Hurst. On
the contrary, she was evidently an attractive young lady to him, and
that
suited her fine.
"I understand from my friend
here that
you were quite impressed by my small and partly retrospective
exhibition in the
"Yes, I was indeed,"
"How generous of you!" cried
Fleshman, blushing slightly.
"As yet, I haven't constructed all that
many works of that nature. But it's a
field of creativity in which I'm becoming increasingly interested." There was a short pause, before he added:
"I take it you preferred the 'Neon Vortices' to my Op exhibits,
then?"
"Only to the extent that it
involved
actual light rather than painterly intimations of or approximations to
such
light, a fact which strikes me as constituting an altogether better and
more
radical stance," Logan averred, slightly surprised by his boldness. "It was more transcendent than those
works which were purely painterly. The
latter were undoubtedly good, but the former, including the two smaller
light
works on display, signified a much higher development - one relative to
the
proletariat rather than to what I would regard as petty-bourgeois
intimations
of proletarian futurity, if you see what I mean."
"Yes, I have to agree,"
Thurber
commented, bringing a little professional opinion to bear on the matter. "The connection with technology is far
closer where such works are concerned."
"And you believe it must
continue to
develop along ever closer lines, do you?" the artist asked, turning
towards Thurber.
"Yes, definitely," the
critic
replied. "After all, what else can
it do?" He looked imploringly at
"Not a great deal," the
latter
conceded deferentially. "Though
there is still scope, I believe, for it to align itself with
transcendentalism
as well as with technology. I mean, it's
not just the machine that counts, but also the spirit, the degree of
our
spiritual evolution, which such art can reflect and encourage."
"Quite," Greta seconded,
breaking
the spell of her attentive silence.
"Technological progress isn't everything."
Fleshman
nodded
his balding head in tacit agreement, then, turning to his latest guest,
he
asked: "And do you think my art reflects and encourages our spiritual
evolution?"
"Some of it does,"
"I don't personally think of
God when
I construct such works," Fleshman
confessed with
a dismissive and slightly apologetic smile.
"But there may be something in what you say, since electric
light
is certainly a spiritual rather than simply a material phenomenon - not
hard
and solid, like iron or steel. However,
what you say also sounds like a species of Manichaean dualism, in which
nature
is considered evil and only spirit good, and I'm not absolutely sure I
can go
along with that."
Greta nodded sympathetically. "We were discussing something similar at
Eddie Hurst's place the other evening," she announced, "Keith
discounting the idea that God should be worshipped through His
creations and
insisting, instead, on the primacy of the spirit."
"That's correct," Thurber
confirmed, recalling to mind the discussion or, rather, extempore
lecture in
question. "God and nature instead
of God in nature was Keith's viewpoint."
"And still is," the latter
admitted.
Fleshman's
face
assumed a puzzled expression. "But
why do you choose to distinguish between them?" he asked, patently
intrigued. "I mean, why is nature
evil?"
"Yes, do tell us!" Yvette
insisted.
There was a short pause
before, screwing up
his brows, as was his wont when obliged to justify a tricky position,
Logan
confessed: "Well, it's not an easy question to answer in a nutshell,
but,
putting the matter as briefly and simply as possible, nature is
fundamentally
evil because it's a manifestation of subconscious life rather than a
combination of subconscious and superconscious
life,
like all the autonomous life-forms ... from the beasts to man. It lacks the divine spark of spirit which
makes for consciousness, and is consequently antithetical to the
spirit, being
darkness as opposed to light. As a
purely sensuous phenomenon it stands as the lowest mode of life,
beneath even
the insects. Naturally, one has to make
use of it, to cultivate the fields and avail oneself of what it
produces,
thereby treating it with a degree of respect.
And, needless to say, there's even some pleasure to be obtained
from it
- from the flowers, bushes, trees, fields, etc., which one would be a
hypocrite
or a fool to deny. Nature in moderation
is by no means a bad thing. After all,
for all our divine aspirations, we are still human beings and therefore
subject
to a certain amount of subconscious life, on which we depend for our
sanity and
integrity as people. Yet to
worship nature, to make a point of regularly associating with it,
especially in
this day and age of more advanced civilization, would seem to betray a
rather
poor sense of priorities. In the Middle
Ages, when man was closer to nature and accordingly less civilized,
less
urbanized, it was only natural that he should have attached greater
importance
to the natural. But now that the vast
majority of us are habituated to a much more urbanized, and hence
artificial,
lifestyle - how irrelevant it would be for us to treat nature with the
same
degree of importance! As our environment
evolves, so we evolve with it. And as
our environment becomes progressively more anti-natural or artificial,
so it's
inevitable that we should become such as well and consequently grow
more
partial to the superconscious, the light
of the
spirit, which stands above and beyond nature.
Thus instead of being pagan nature-worshippers, we should
increasingly
become transcendental experiencers of what
is
potentially God ... as manifested in the superconscious
mind. We discover, on this level, that
God is not a something out there, still less a creator of or
resident in
nature, but a state-of-mind, an entirely introspective experience. He or, rather, it ... is what the great
historical mystics have always known God to be - a spiritual
transcendence of
the flesh. But despite their
determination to know or see God, they could only do so in small doses,
with
brief glimpses of their own inner light - glimpses that were
necessarily brief
because they were less under the divine sway of the superconscious,
overall, than their latter-day counterparts and, indeed, intelligent
city
people in general tend to be. Living in
smaller communities, in closer contact with nature, they were more
balanced
between the subconscious and superconscious
minds,
and consequently would have found it harder to break through to the superconscious and experience pure spirituality. By dint of sheer effort and persistence they
obtained, every now and then, a glimpse, but that was all!
A glimpse was all evolution could then spare
them. The influence of the subconscious
was always there, keeping them tied to earth."
"Yet, presumably, it's
always there
with us too, preventing us from living entirely in the inner light?" Fleshman deduced.
"Indeed, though not to the
same extent
as in the Middle Ages,"
"However, we're not so
spiritually
advanced that we can tune-in to the superconscious
whenever we like and thus experience pure spirituality on a lengthy
basis," he went on, having paused to gulp down some cola.
"Those of us who specifically dedicate
ourselves to breaking through to the spirit still have to contend with
a fair
amount of subconscious influence, which makes it a difficult business
and
virtually ensures that if, by any chance, we do break through,
it's only
on a relatively transient basis - not, alas, for hours on end! We may have progressed a little from the
Christian mystics, but, in spiritual terms, scarcely to any appreciable
extent,
least of all to an extent which enables us to dally in the presence of
what is
potentially God for very long. Most of
the time we live in a kind of diluted or superficial relationship with
it, in
which normal consciousness, as a fusion between the subconscious and superconscious parts of the psyche, tends to
predominate. Only, these days, the
subconscious has less power over us than formerly, and we can therefore
look
down upon it from a post-dualistic, as from a post-egocentric or
post-humanistic, vantage point."
"Perhaps some of us more
than
others," Fleshman commented, breaking into
an
ironic smile. "But what about you -
have you experienced Infused Contemplation, or whatever the expression
is, and
consequently come face-to-face with true divinity?"
"But you do meditate?"
Yvette
conjectured curiously.
"Yes, though not to any
great
extent." He paused a moment, as
though to gather his thoughts, then said: "What little I can manage,
whether it's twenty minutes a day or half-an-hour every two days, isn't
sufficient to bring me intimate knowledge of ultimate divinity."
"Then why do it?" Fleshman wanted to know.
"Well, I suppose one has to
begin
somewhere,"
"But if one doesn't
experience the
inner light to any appreciable extent, what's the point?" Greta
objected,
shrugging her shoulders.
"Quite," both Thurber and
Yvette
seconded doubtfully.
"Well, with this particular
approach
to meditation, one can at least experience something on the fringes of
pure
spirituality,"
"So you'd incline to
consider anyone
who regularly meditated and laid claim to direct experience of the
inner light
but hadn't experienced Infused Contemplation to be a fraud, would you?"
Fleshman suggested, selecting from the
wealth of available
material what he took to be the crux of
"Yes, absolutely," the
abstract
novelist affirmed. "Though I'd be
inclined to consider anyone who regarded himself as godlike, but wasn't
the
recipient of a total and permanent eclipse of the subconscious by the superconscious to be an even bigger fraud. For unless one's consciousness is entirely
eclipsed by the inner light, one is still a man, no matter how
talented,
clever, or spiritually earnest one may happen to be.
Man is ever that which stands, on a higher
evolutionary level than the beasts, between the plants and the godlike,
between
the lowest life-forms that currently exist and the hypothetical highest
life-forms which have yet to come into existence - though hopefully
they will
in the not-too-distant millennial future.
As man evolves to ever greater spiritual heights, so he'll have
correspondingly less to do with nature, less interest in and respect
for that
which stands at the furthest remove from him ... in subconscious
dominion. At present, however, a degree of
interest in
and respect for nature is still required.
For we're not, with very few exceptions, so spiritually advanced
that we
can afford to be over-ambitious in our determination to dispense with
nature
altogether, and thus run the risk of seriously jeopardizing our
integrity as
human beings. The disastrous
consequences of being too idealistic and progressive in this respect
were aptly
demonstrated, in The
Devils
of Loudun, by Father Surin who, as a result of too radical an
allegiance to
Manichaean idealism at a time when the compromise with nature was
greater than
at present, went mad and would doubtless have remained so, had it not
been for
the help and care of a certain Father Bastide,
who
eventually
brought him back to sanity.
Returned him, in other words, to an attitude less Manichaean and
correspondingly more compatible with the degree of environmental
evolution
characteristic of his time."
There was a confirmatory nod
from
Greta. "Yes, I recall the chapter
dealing with Surin's madness quite well,"
she
revealed, "and thoroughly agree with the conclusion you draw from it. Huxley certainly castigated the Manichaean
attitude which Father Surin initially
fostered,
deeming it a mistaken viewpoint. To him,
nature couldn't be separated from God's Creation but was inextricably
tied-up
with Him - was, in fact, a phenomenal manifestation of the Divine Mind. He wouldn't have sanctioned the anti-natural
attitudes of those latter-day Surins such
as
Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Mondrian."
"Probably not,"
"But if God didn't create
nature, then
who or what did?" Greta queried, somewhat puzzled by
"Presumably the Devil," Fleshman ventured, allowing himself the pleasure
of a
roguish snigger, which duly infected both Yvette and Thurber.
"Well, in a manner of
speaking, one could
equate
subconscious, and especially cosmic, phenomena with the Devil,"
"Even sunflowers?" Fleshman humorously objected.
"Yes, I dare say so,"
"I recall your saying
something
similar last Saturday, concerning the successive nature of the Trinity
rather
than its assumed simultaneity," Thurber announced, alluding to Logan's
conversation at Hurst's party, "so that religious evolution in the West
may be regarded as a progression from the dark to the light, from the
Father to
the Holy Ghost via Jesus Christ."
He blushed to hear himself talking theology.
For, like most of his race, he was pragmatic
and empirical, and normally avoided anything so subjective as religion,
which,
when genuine, was less concerned with the given than with what could
conceivably materialize in the future, if men put their trust, or
faith, in
evolutionary truth and hence, by implication, in messianic redemption.
"Right,"
"Doubtless no-one will deign
to
believe that a spirit could have created matter, and that nature
therefore has
a divine origin," Fleshman remarked. "In fact, what you're saying leads one
to the conclusion that, just as a colourful flower has its roots in the
soil
and thus springs from a rather mundane source, one which signifies a
fall from
cosmic sensuality, so pure spirituality has its roots, so to speak, in
man, and
only comes into being gradually, as a consequence of our progressive
evolution
away from nature. Rather than being the
source of all life, as has traditionally been believed, God is
essentially the
consummation or culmination of it, the goal towards which ascending
life
aspires."
"Precisely!" Logan agreed,
visibly gratified by the artist's receptivity to his ideas, which were
broadly
expressive, in Nietzschean parlance, of a 'transvaluation' of traditional values. "God evolves with man and depends for
man on His or, rather, its existence. If
we cease to evolve and regress, so God ceases to evolve and regresses
with us. If we continue to evolve and
eventually
attain to a condition where the superconscious
reigns
supreme, we shall see God face-to-face and thus become divine. If, on the other hand, we regress to a point
where the subconscious reigns supreme, we shall see or, rather, feel
the Devil
and thus become diabolic. However, the
chances of our doing the latter are, despite the reactionary attitudes
of
writers who revel in sensuality, like D.H. Lawrence and John Cowper
Powys,
extremely remote. Evolution drives us
on, fortunately, and it's as the willing servants of evolution and
master of
our destiny that we shall eventually attain to the goal of superconscious
bliss, the 'peace that surpasses all understanding' and the light of
lights. Even your lights, Paul, will be
totally eclipsed by it, dependent, as they are, on the electron
bombardment of
phosphor."
"Which is something I should
dearly
love to see," Fleshman confessed, smiling
radiantly. "The artist,
paradoxically, can only intimate of ultimate truth, even with the use
of
lasers, since his lights are forever external to the spiritual self and
thus no
more than a symbol for that which, as pure spirit, resides in the mind."
"Yes, I guess so," said
That evening during dinner
Keith Logan
continued to assume the didactic role and to dominate conversation,
spurred on
by pertinent and prompting questions from Fleshman,
who
seemed
to regard him as a sort of oracle or guru.
The subject of lasers having
already been
touched upon in the sitting room, the abstract novelist now proceeded
to
expatiate on the superiority of the purer light they produced to the
comparatively chemical, diffuse light obtained through fluorescent
tubes and
light bulbs. Laser beams, he contended,
would come to assume an increasingly important role in the evolution of
art,
and so, too, would holograms, which perfectly reflected our growing
predilection for the immaterial, or de-materializing of matter, in
deference to
a superconscious bias.
Holography, in which virtually true
three-dimensional images could be obtained of the object exposed to
laser
light, was undoubtedly an art form of the future, capable of achieving
visual
wonders as yet scarcely imagined. Where
further developments of this medium would lead, it was difficult if not
impossible to foretell. For there was
certainly no reason to believe that we had seen everything yet, nor any
reason
to doubt that what we had seen of works constructed from ordinary
electric or
fluorescent light couldn't be refined upon or expanded into new
concepts, as Fleshman's exhibits at the Fairborne
Gallery had adequately shown. There was
certainly potential for further development in that field, too!
To which opinion the artist
readily
concurred, intimating, in the process, that he was also interested in
the
production of laser works and would in future be dedicating more time
to
them. But what did they, Thurber as well
as Logan, make of the other exhibition - the one containing works by
Joseph Philpott?
This time it was Thurber who
answered
first, by revealing that they hadn't thought so highly of it, although
there
were a number of abstract works in the geometrical and
precisely-calculated
manner of Max Bill on display which they had preferred to the
representational
ones. Somehow these latter were of a
lower order of painting, though not as low, he was obliged to concede,
as could
have been the case. And here it was
Logan's turn to come to the fore again, positing the contention that
there
existed a kind of hierarchy of representational painting - as, indeed,
of abstract
painting - in which the city took precedence over nature.
Thus such works as they had
witnessed,
mostly of skyscraper-type buildings and a variety of machines for
industrial
application, were certainly of a superior representational order to
what would
have been the case had either of them been confronted by a landscape
artist. With the representational
canvases of Joe Philpott one was at least
looking at
civilization, not at something prior to or beneath it.
And the fact that he concentrated on the big
city, or metropolis, with never a hint of verdure, made his work of a
transcendentally superior order to artists who might alternatively have
chosen
to concentrate on a small or medium-sized town, with views of hills,
trees, and
bushes either surrounding it or in the background.
Yes indeed!
For just as there was a
hierarchy between
those who specialized in natural phenomena, so a hierarchy existed
between the
artists of civilization, which was no less apparent.
In the former case, the worst offenders
against the spirit, in
But, still, not all
naturalistic paintings
were quite as extreme, and it was possible to take slightly
more
pleasure or, at any rate, less displeasure in those artists who
preferred a
more temperate zone, where the landscape was less sensuous. Then, of course, there were those who placed
an animal or animals in the landscape, and thus lifted their work above
the
subconscious, even if, by the incorporation, say, of pigs, cattle, or
sheep,
they didn't lift it very far towards the superconscious. But at least animal life was higher than
plant life, in consequence of which it should be possible to judge a
landscape
with animals spiritually superior to one without any, the more animal
life in
proportion to landscape, or nature, and the higher the type of animals
the
better the painting. And then, on a
still higher level of representational art, would be those paintings
which
included human life in the landscape or natural surroundings, the ratio
of the
one to the other determining their relative status, so that paintings
in which
humanity predominated over nature would be spiritually superior to
those in
which the converse was the case, and so on, through all manner of
subtle
gradations of content and context.
Frankly, it was possible,
But what applied to
naturalism applied no less
to the various levels of civilization depicted, which, as already
noted, were
open to a similar scale of thematic assessment, beginning with the
meanest
village and culminating in the greatest city, through all degrees of
natural/artificial content in any number of realistic/materialistic
contexts. Thus Philpott's
big cityscapes, eschewing all traces of nature, were evidently of the
highest
order of artificial representation, signifying the most advanced level
yet
attained by civilization in the face of nature.
Together with the machines he painted, they attested to
evolutionary
progress not just with regard to large-scale urbanization and
industrialization, but also, and no less importantly, with regard to
art, which,
in evolving beyond naturalism, had attained to an unprecedented level
of
representational importance. Whether it
could progress any further in such terms remained to be seen; though,
providing
cities continued to expand and become ever more sophisticated, subject
to new
orders of architectural innovation in which more synthetically advanced
materials were utilized to a transcendental end, there seemed to be no
reason
for one to suppose otherwise.
As Keith Logan had already
intimated,
however, Philpott's representational works
were, for
all their relevance to the contemporary world, of an inferior order of
painting
to his abstract works, which, seemingly inspired by the geometrical
principles
of Neo-Plasticism, attested to a higher and
altogether more spiritual realm of creativity - one necessarily
idealistic
rather than materialistic in scope. For,
in the development of the modern, it was, above all, the progress of
abstraction that counted for most, as this was a species of art which,
properly
speaking, had only come into existence in the twentieth century and
signified a
level of creativity beyond and above the purely representational, in
which the
spiritual came to predominate over the material, and the individual
accordingly
managed to assert a new importance over society.
Thus the small number of
abstract canvases
on display in the Philpott exhibition was,
in
Opposed to this or, rather,
on the level of
proletarian materialism, were the most recent developments in machine
art,
whether in the form of auto-destructive machines, as with Jean Tinguely, or of highly-complex programmed
machines, such as
the American James Seawright had invented. And, of course, aligned with this were the
experiments being made with computers and video-recorders, which were
generally
of a secular, or technological, order.
Thus whatever was
essentially concerned
with light could be said to constitute the new religious art, an art
pertinent
to transcendental man which, now as before, took precedence over the
materialistic art-forms currently in existence.
A Gyorgy Kepes
was
therefore, from Logan's standpoint, a superior type of artist to a Jean
Tinguely, a Takis
to a James Seawright; though, as the
writer was at pains to remind his
audience, a clear-cut distinction between religious and secular artists
couldn't always be inferred, there being major artists who, like
Nicholas Schöffer, experimented in both
fields, thereby attesting to
a kind of liberal compromise between the two extremes.
However, as regards Paul Fleshman,
there could be little doubt that his work, culminating in light art,
was of a
superior order to Philpott's, since
predominantly and
intrinsically religious. Apart from the
low-level abstracts, the latter artist's work was mostly secular, if of
a
relatively high order of secularity within the, by and large,
petty-bourgeois
context of contemporary painterly art.
To be sure, Fleshman
was indeed gratified by this opinion, and hastened to express his
gratitude by
offering
To which, of course, they
all agreed,
particularly Logan, who elected to assert that beyond light art there
was nothing
higher, especially where the use of fluorescent tubing and laser beams
were
concerned, which, in the hands of the finest artists, had taken
religious art
to its highest ever peaks. For the
progress of art meant that, these days, the world's leading artists
were
second-to-none - indeed, were superior to all the so-called great
artists the
world had already produced. Where the
great masters of the past had been obliged to express the spiritual in
terms of
Christianity and through the medium of paint, their contemporary
counterparts
had the benefit of religious evolution to draw upon and a much more
spiritual
medium in which to work. Paint was still
paint - a kind of liquid matter that solidified. But
electric
or neon light ... who could
touch or feel that? Who could deny its
spiritual essence or intangibility? And
because God was spirit or, more specifically, the pure spirituality
that would
emerge from the superconscious at the
culmination of
evolution, who could fail to perceive the analogy with God which the
finest
light art evoked, even though such an analogy was paradoxically based
on
chemical or electrical means?
Here it was not Christ so
much as that
which, as pure spirituality, stood above and beyond Him ... with which
one was
essentially concerned. No longer
Christian symbolism, but the truth of God per
se. How therefore could one fail to
recognize the
moral superiority of this art to whatever had preceded it in the
paradoxical
realm of religious representation? How
could one fail to see in artists such as Kepes,
Takis, Schöffer,
and,
indeed,
Paul Fleshman himself, the culmination of
the
spiritual in art thus far, whether or not such artists were consciously
aware
of producing religious art? The very
fact of human evolution virtually guaranteed one a certain knowledge
that art,
no less than everything else, continued to progress through the
centuries until
such time as it attained to a maximum approximation to the spiritual
essence of
God, and thus completed its destiny.
Whether, in fact, art had
already arrived
at its ultimate goal was, to say the least, a debatable point. For there were still many interesting
experiments and refinements on previous attainments being made which,
providing
the world wasn't suddenly plunged into a nuclear holocaust, would
probably
continue for some time to come, bringing the approximation to God's
spiritual
essence ever closer through the use of a brighter, purer inner light. After all, art wasn't just an arbitrary affair. On the contrary, it was a very definite
procedure with an ever-present responsibility to evolution. Once it had attained to its zenith, there
could be no deviations into dilettantish irrelevance.
Its final flowering was what ultimately
mattered. And if it hadn't already
reached that stage, then, as
Indeed, the artist was, of
course,
immensely gratified to hear this, especially as he had occasionally
entertained
serious doubts concerning the validity of his own work.
Now, on the contrary, he could tell himself
that he was one of the Chosen Few blessed with the responsibility of
bringing
art if not to its climax then certainly to something near it, and that
he,
personally, was artistically superior to any of the men of the Italian
Renaissance or of the German Baroque or the French Rococo or whatever,
being
the recipient of a much higher phase of artistic evolution. With the use of slender neon tubing and
brightly coloured lights, he was producing work that Michelangelo
couldn't even
have dreamed of, so far was it above and beyond the leading
imaginations of the
Renaissance. And even the importance
subsequently ascribed to light by the leading men of the Baroque, what
could
they do to compete with him? By
comparison to the maximum brightness he could achieve, their light was
indeed
dim, scarcely a close approximation to the spirit of God which they
vainly
strove to depict, compliments of anthropomorphic necessity, through
representational means. Their religious
sense, commensurate with the level of evolution manifest in the
seventeenth
century, was hardly such as to cause any enlightened latter-day artist
to envy
them. No matter how earnest their desire
to approximate to the essence of God, they could never transcend the
anthropomorphic limitations of their time.
By comparison with the finest modern artists, they lived in a
kind of
purgatorial twilight between the sensuous darkness of the Father and
the
spiritual light(ness) of the Holy Ghost, an emotional realm of the
loving heart
to which they were obliged to reconcile themselves as best they could.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Sitting
at
his
desk in the editor's office of 'Art and Artist', Edward Hurst
stared across
at the stooped head of his sub-editor, Stuart Hill, who was at that
moment bent
over the closely typed pages of Thurber's latest review.
The critic had submitted this review in all
good faith, and now that
"Well?" he demanded,
refocusing
his eyes on the sub-editor, who had in the meantime completed his
reading of
the text. "What d'you
make of it?"
Hill blinked rapidly and
shrugged narrow
shoulders. "I'm not absolutely
sure," he confessed, with an appropriately puzzled expression on his
middle-aged face. "It's certainly
in Thurber's style but ..." and here he briefly referred his attention
back to the typescript and shook his head "... I find it extremely
difficult to believe that he would have expressed himself in exactly
these
terms."
"Ah, you mean he wouldn't
have held so
many of the opinions expressed there?"
The sub-editor nodded
vaguely, then said:
"Yes, it's the content that especially puzzles me.
I mean, since when has he ever referred to a
bright monochromatic canvas as 'pleasingly transcendental'? Indeed, have we ever encountered the word
'transcendental' in his reviews before?"
"Not to my knowledge we
haven't,"
"Quite so," Hill confirmed,
nodding sharply. "He has taken a
sensibly rational view of them, such as would appeal to the majority of
our
readers, and thereby regarded the results as either poor art or, more
usually,
as no art at all! He has never
considered them pleasing, much less 'pleasingly transcendental'."
"And what do you make of his
response
to that exhibit comprised of a large globe of white paint surrounded by
a
narrow band of black paint?"
"Yes, that really puzzles
me,"
Hill confessed, frowning down at the review in his trembling hands. "Especially where he contends that it
'encourages the most optimistic and spiritually satisfying reflections'. One wonders what he can mean."
"Absolutely!"
"And a rather anarchic alien
spirit
too," Hill opined, reading on.
"For not only does he embrace Op Art with an enthusiasm I
wouldn't
ordinarily associate with him but, to crown one's bewilderment, he goes
on to
apply a similar enthusiasm to the Kinetic works on display, deeming
their
creator a disciple of J-R Soto and a credit to Kinetic ensembles in
general. Frankly, this is hard to believe!"
"You needn't remind me,"
said
Hurst, who sighed in heartfelt exasperation.
"His attitude to Kinetics was always what we would have expected
it
to be.... Not that he was given that many opportunities to come into
close
contact with it. However, if that's hard
to believe, what follows is downright impossible!"
"You mean his eulogistic
attitude
towards the neon tubes?" Hill nervously suggested.
"You bet I do!"
"Since he wrote this would
appear to
be the most obvious answer," Hill remarked, in a mild attempt at
humour. "And to an extent,
moreover, which makes it possible for him to regard an anarchic
arrangement or,
rather, derangement of variously-coloured neon tubes as 'a rather fine
work'. Really, one ought to feel sorry
for the poor jerk! He even goes so far
as to imagine that Moholy-Nagy would have
been
impressed by it."
"Who's he?" asked an angry
"One of the originators of
light art,
I believe,” Hill replied, momentarily looking-up from the typescript on
his
lap, as though to reassure himself that his senior colleague was still
serious. "But whether or not Moholy-Nagy would
have been
impressed, it's above all the fact that Thurber was impressed by it
which
worries me. It's really
out-of-character. As you say, impossible
to believe."
"Absolutely,"
"You mean, someone may have
suggested
it to him?" Hill conjectured doubtfully.
"That's the most probable
explanation," admitted Hurst, who had got up from his leather-backed
swivel chair and was slowly pacing backwards and forwards on the narrow
space
of wooden floor behind it. He appeared
to be deeply absorbed in thought, completely withdrawn from his
surroundings.
"But who?" Hill asked in
exasperation.
"I have my ideas," said
"I see," sighed Hill in
evident
relief. "And you think this someone
may have gone along to the exhibition with him and influenced his
review?"
he cautiously suggested.
But
now
that
the completed text was before him and, even granted Thurber's
usual
puritanical preference for the abstract over the representational,
quite
clearly bore the mark of an alien influence - how could he keep his
promise? How could he possibly allow
himself to fall victim to a further humiliation at
Yes, it was precisely on
account of this
comparatively recent change of emphasis on Thurber's part that
However, it was the
sub-editor who broke
the psychological deadlock - at least in
"I suppose so,"
"Yes?" Hill pressed,
anxiously
peering into his senior colleague's worry-strained face.
"Oh, nothing,"
"Perhaps it will
be a
little hard on Thurber," conceded the sub-editor, who was slightly
surprised by
"And score one off against
that jerk Fleshman in the process," Hill
declared. "For I'm convinced that nothing
would
give him greater satisfaction than to receive a favourable review in
our
periodical."
"Damn fool!"
"Oh, you mean the 'Neon
Vortices'?" Hill observed, immediately turning the page to the exhibit
in
question.
"Yes, that's the one," said
"Doesn't it just?" the
sub-editor
concurred, smiling wryly. "Though
it boggles even more at the fact that our reviewer regards this work as
the
fruit of a long tradition of neon projects that should extend into the
future
on a still brighter and more transcendental basis.
One wonders what-the-hell he can mean?"
Hurst coughed contemptuously
and fidgeted
nervously in his chair, causing an involuntary swivel, which only
served to
underline the general uncertainty.
"Well, whatever he damn-well means, it won't extend into the
future
in our
publication," he solemnly averred. "We
shall continue to maintain a
twilight bias against the light."
"Naturally," Hill confirmed. "And, in that respect, Philpott's
art would generally appear to be closer to our
mundane requirements than this other business.
Unfortunately, his representational canvases don't appear to
have
received the warmest of critical appraisals from our official reviewer,
do
they? Which is a great pity since, from
what I already know of the man, he seems to be a highly talented artist
- indeed,
one of the most accomplished figurative artists currently at work."
"Quite, and one who knows
how to draw
a line, so to speak, between sanity and madness, genuine art and sham
art,"
Hill nodded his professional
agreement and thereupon
returned the review to the editor's desk.
"Oh well, since we're not going to publish this we needn't fear
that Philpott will be offended by what's
written in
it," he said. Maybe we can arrange
to give him a better deal, critically speaking, in future - assuming he
continues to exhibit quality work?"
"Yes, I can't see why not,"
"None whatsoever." Hill had got up from his chair and was
striding towards the door. "I'll
leave you to take care of Thurber," he said, turning round when he
reached
it.
"Thanks,"
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Light,
just
light
and peace. Let the true and deeper
self reveal itself! Let there be an end
to distracting thoughts! Just light and
peace. Yes, and then perhaps one would
be closer to pure spirituality. Then,
sooner or later, one would experience revealed truth - the light of
Infused
Contemplation. At present, however,
nothing that could be described as union with ultimate divinity. At present, just this fringe higher
consciousness of waiting upon truth, waiting upon bliss.
Such a long way to go, but not to despair! Never
lose
hope that eventually the day of
deliverance will come and only pure spirituality reign supreme. Not personally, however, not for you - the
latter-day aspirant. No, at best a few
seconds or perhaps even a minute or two of ultimate truth, such as one
could be
expected to bear. Something equivalent
to or maybe even greater than what the foremost saints experienced in
the
past. Yes, in this day and age hopefully
something greater than that. A clear
intimation of what it would be like to live only in the superconscious
mind, freed altogether from subconscious constraints.
Freed, in other words, from the daily round
of egocentric influences and dualistic consciousness.
Dualistic?
No, not quite! A different
consciousness, certainly, from that experienced by medieval man. Less under subconscious dominion and
therefore correspondingly less egocentric.
Different, too, from the consciousness experienced by pagan man,
with
his penchant for the 'dark gods of the loins' and horrible blood
sacrifices. Much less under subconscious
dominion than
him! No longer in fear of a vengeful
deity, thank goodness! No longer beastly
and a nature-worshipper, with a guilty conscience for essentially being
in
rebellion against the sensual, and thus somehow different from the
beasts. No, and still less under
subconscious
dominion than the caveman, that creature who was almost a beast and
dwelt among
beasts as among equals in the struggle for survival.
No, most definitely a different kind of
consciousness than would have been acknowledged by one's distant
ancestors! Rather, a post-egocentric
consciousness, incipiently transcendental, growing all the time more
biased
towards the superconscious and thus less
under the
sway of its dark antithesis. Surely
approaching a time when even to own a dog would be to render oneself
too
exposed to commerce with beasts, and dogs are accordingly banished from
society
as no longer acceptable or relevant?
Phased-out, in conjunction with other unnecessary animals,
because we
can no longer tolerate their beastliness and desire only to be
surrounded by
that which reflects our superconscious
idealism?
Yes, so not a dualistic
consciousness now
but, still, a consciousness which can only expect a relatively brief
intimation
of what it would mean to be entirely beyond the subconscious. Yet, even so, a consciousness that is
certainly better and higher than any consciousness which has preceded
it in the
long history of our race, and one, moreover, that will continue to
improve, to
grow ever more enamoured of the inner light, ever more attuned to the
artificial, the development towards greater environmental perfection of
the
city and its salutary spiritualizing influence.
But little by little, generation following generation,
refinement superseding
refinement, dedication eclipsing dedication, towards ever higher peaks
of
spiritual attainment. Until at length,
after decades or even centuries of spiritual progress, our descendants
attain
to the culmination of human evolution and become completely godlike,
the worthy
recipients of superconscious bliss, a life
form at
the furthest possible remove from the beasts - the ultimate life form
...
eternal and complete, the consummation of Christian prophecy in the
heavenly
side of the Last Judgement! But, in the
meantime, now as before, a series of temporal judgements, the dividing
of the
wheat from the chaff and the subsequent damnation of the latter. In the meantime, evolution continues its
journey, whatever one's beliefs or status, towards its ultimate goal. It can do nothing else.
So light and peace for those
who want it,
those who wish to draw nearer to ultimate divinity.
Nearer certainly, though not, except possibly
at rare occasions and in minute doses, right into the divine presence. Not yet, at any rate! Only
by
degrees, a little at a time. God as
pure spirituality, inner light,
ultimate truth, superconscious bliss,
known and
knower at once. A condition that is
always potentially with one and yet diluted, impeded by the
subconscious from showing
itself in all its glory - except, that is, on rare occasions and for
brief
periods of time for those who seek it.
But a condition that is destined to shine through to a much
greater
extent in the future, to extend its influence over all its devotees
until such
time as nothing but the inner light exists and they become One with it. Man evolving towards God, away from the
Devil. Towards ultimate positivity, away from primal negativity. Man in his prime as man - in balance
between evil and good. Man past his
prime as man - predominantly good.
Man become godlike - entirely good.
Perfect! At present, less
imperfect than formerly, becoming purer, less diluted by the sensual. Gaining a slow but sure spiritual victory
over the Devil, which is impure darkness.
Climbing ever closer towards the heavenly light.
So let there be light and
peace! Let the truth have a chance to
reveal itself
if I am worthy of it! If not, then I
mustn't lose heart but should continue to offer myself in waiting,
continue to
make myself available, so that the highest in me comes shining through
in
self-revelation. Yet if, after years of
perseverance in such waiting, the highest in me is still unable to
fully reveal
itself, then I must resign myself to my impure condition and accept its
diluted
state as just. I must not doubt the
existence of the ultimate 'promised land' of the spirit because of
this, but
should take fresh confidence in the hope that those who come after me
will be
in a better psychic position to glimpse it, and perhaps dally in it for
awhile. So I'll rest content to be
merely a humble link in the chain of the generations stretching from
alpha to
omega, Hell to Heaven. I shall accept my
fate as just. For the great majority of
men are inevitably doomed, not so much to Hell, these days, as to
simple human
death. I shall understand the logic of
my position in relation to the subconscious, which presumably still has
more
influence over me than is commensurate with the full revelation of
undiluted
truth. Tomorrow's generations will be
superior to today's.
Therein lies our hope for the future.
But now I have thought and
reasoned too
much! I have quite forgotten the duty I
had set myself in preparing my mind for the divine presence. I must refrain from thinking and so grant the
higher level of superconsciousness an
opportunity to
become manifest. Thought pertains to the
lower level, and therein lies its limitations.
It isn't pure, even when at its best.
So let there be light and peace ...
At that moment, the sharp
ringing of the
doorbell to his flat interrupted these psychic ruminations and put an
abrupt
halt to his good intentions. It quite
startled him, making him forsake whatever equanimity he was in the
process of
achieving. Who-on-earth could that be,
he wondered? He hadn't been expecting
anyone to call that evening. It was more
than a little inconvenient! And so he
waited, listening a few seconds, hoping that the bell wouldn't be rung
again. But such wasn't to be the
case. For a second and more insistent
ringing duly followed in the first one's wake, obliging him to clamber
to his
feet. He didn't have the nerve to ignore
it - not, at any rate, when he had worked himself up into an honourable
frame-of-mind with the intention of meditating.
Yet it was inconvenient to him, all the same, and he couldn't
help
cursing his luck, as he staggered out of the brightly lit all-white
room and
into the comparative shadow of the dimly lit hall.
"Just a minute!" he shouted,
while he fumbled his way along the narrow passageway that led to the
front
door. He was quite dazed by the sudden
change of light and the accompanying exertion of bodily movement, the
sudden
surge of blood from compressed channels, hardly recognizing his face in
the
hall mirror. But he seemed presentable
enough, even given the fact that he was still attired in his all-white
meditating clothes - teeshirt, flannels,
socks,
sneakers - and looked somewhat like a ghost.
Too bad if the caller didn't like his appearance!
Again the doorbell sounded
in his ears, but
this time he was ready for it and immediately pounced on the door, as
though to
silence it. His recognition of the
caller wasn't so immediate however, partly because of his dazed
state-of-mind
and partly, too, because he had only seen her twice before. But when it did come she elicited from him an
exclamation of surprise and delight, which considerably enriched the
simple
utterance of her name. He could scarcely
believe his eyes.
"Hi, Keith," said Greta
with,
despite evident relief at seeing him, a worried look on her face. "I'm sorry to bother you this evening,
but do you mind if I come in and talk to you?"
"No, not at all," he assured
her,
standing to one side so that she could enter the passageway. A whiff of sweet perfume lodged in his
nostrils as she drew up alongside him, causing him to smile with secret
pleasure. It was the same perfume, he
recalled, that she had worn at Fleshman's
gathering
the other night. But he couldn't very
well permit himself to dwell on that subject when he didn't know the
exact
reason for her visit. Perhaps, after
all, something was seriously amiss? She
didn't look particularly happy anyway.
He closed the door and motioned her to follow him back along the
passageway into his living room at the far end.
It was a cosy little room but, at the moment, rather chilly. So, after an apology about that, he set about
switching on the fan heater there.
"Please excuse my appearance," he added, as she took a chair
in front of him.
"I hadn't noticed anything
wrong with
it," she responded, giving him a cursory inspection.
"Oh well, it's just that I
was in the
process of meditating when you arrived, and didn't have time to change
my
clothes. I don't usually receive
visitors garbed like this, you see."
Greta blushed faintly and
lowered her eyes
in shame. "Please forgive me for
disturbing you," she begged him.
"No trouble,"
"Through Martin," she
candidly
replied. "He gave it to me
yesterday."
"Really?
And is that why you want to talk to me -
about Thurber?"
"Yes, absolutely! You see ..." She didn't quite know where
to begin, especially since
"Can I get you a coffee or
something?" he offered.
"Yes, thanks."
She looked somewhat relieved at the prospect
of a hot drink, which
"Now then, take your time
with what
you have to tell me," he advised her, noting that in the meantime Greta
had taken off her short leather jacket and lain it by the side of the
chair.
"Well, to put it as briefly
as
possible, Martin has lost his job as a regular contributor to 'Art and
Artist',
having also had his latest review rejected by Mr Hurst," she ventured.
"Yes, precisely! The editor phoned him yesterday morning to
say that his article was unsuitable and would be returned in due
course."
"But why?"
"Apparently because it
reflects too
many attitudes incompatible with the publication's requirements," Greta
revealed. "In short, because it
bears the stamp of your influence."
"My influence?"
"No, well that's what he
evidently
did, and under the misguided assumption, moreover, that he would be
producing a
better and more objective review in consequence," Greta averred. "You see, he'd been worried since the
night of Mr Hurst's party that the editor would drop him from the
magazine in
consequence of ... well, forgive me for saying so but ... the
displeasure your
conversation engendered in our host during the course of the evening."
"My conversation?"
"You must be aware, surely,
that Mr
Hurst was none too sympathetic towards your religious views."
"Yes, but I don't see how
that could
have any bearing on Thurber's review."
"Unfortunately it does,
though for
reasons that you probably wouldn't understand." She
swallowed
a mouthful of coffee and then
stared angrily at the carpet in front of her.
"But don't think I'm blaming you for what has happened between
Martin and the magazine," she went on.
"It's against Edward Hurst that I bear a grudge ... for breaking
his promise!"
"I'm afraid I don't quite
follow
you,"
Greta was on the verge of
tears, and the
hand holding the coffee was trembling slightly.
She didn't really want to tell
"And he promised to keep his
word?" responded Logan, who was visibly shocked by her revelation, as
well
as slightly embarrassed in the proximity of so beautiful a woman.
"Yes, absolutely!" Greta
confirmed. "I was solemnly assured
as much."
"The dirty double-crossing
bastard!"
At this point Greta could
contain her
thwarted emotions no longer but burst into an avalanche of tears, a
victim of
outraged innocence. She put the coffee
to one side and hid her face in her hands.
"I'm dreadfully sorry,"
Greta
stammered through tear-drenched lips.
"Please forgive me. I'm
really behaving quite stupidly."
"Here, take this to dry your
eyes
with!" he advised her, extracting a clean paper tissue from his front
pocket. He so hated to see people upset,
and, as she made an effort to dry her eyes, he clasped her more tightly
against
himself and began, almost unconsciously, to stroke her hair, at first
very
tentatively and then, as she calmed down a little, with greater
firmness. "There, there!" he soothed her
anew, as he drew her head against his chest and, again almost
unconsciously,
planted a gentle kiss on it, continuing all the while to stroke her
hair. Inevitably, the scent of her perfume
once
more entered his nostrils and, in spite of himself, engendered a subtle
pleasure, made him conscious not so much of a suffering person in his
arms as
of a highly attractive woman - a woman whose slender nape was now
exposed to
his tender gaze, and whose shoulder blades and arms excited a degree of
lust it
would have been difficult if not impossible to ignore.
In a split second his mind changed track,
becoming conscious of a sexuality and desire which prolonged celibacy
could
only intensify, and although he feebly struggled against the temptation
to
exploit her weakness, the lure of her flesh was too strong to resist
and he
found himself growing aroused by it and becoming strangely indifferent
to any
finer feelings. Already the hand that
had initially clasped her to himself was gently but steadily working
its way up
and down her back, and also roaming farther afield
over the no-less attractive terrain lower down.
It was even working its way under her vest to the bare skin
beneath, and
as it did so his lips desired not the crown of her head so much as the
response
of her lips - indeed, forced such a response upon her as, in mute
resignation,
she turned her face up towards him and closed her eyes, closed them
upon past
pain while simultaneously opening her lips to present pleasure. Yes, now indeed would come her true
consolation, now he could really give it to her!
She lay on the carpet, her
miniskirt up
round her hips, her head turned away from him, while he sat beside her
and
gazed down over the expanse of her shapely body. Was
there
a blemish on it? He didn't think so,
at least not from what he
could see of it at that moment. He liked
the way she was built, liked it all over.
Felt that she was just his kind of woman, even down to the shape
of her
sex, which was one of those open or, as he liked to think of them,
diamond-shaped vaginas which he preferred to the closed, or tight,
variety. There could be no denying her
physical attractiveness, for it had certainly got the better of him or,
to put
the matter in a slightly more romantic light, induced him to appreciate
it to
the hilt. And now that he had
appreciated it as much as his nature seemed to require, he felt
relatively
satisfied and purged, so to speak, of sensual desire.
But not altogether happy since, deep down, he
was rather ashamed of himself for having exploited her distress to his
own
sexual advantage, even though she had been the more sexually active of
the two
as, standing front to back, he had inserted himself into her and got
her to
ease herself up-and-down on him both in response to the fact of how she
was
dressed and to his transcendental lifestyle which, just prior to
Greta's
appearance, had taken a radically contemplative turn.
"Are you angry with me?" he
nervously asked, his voice pregnant with anticipated remorse.
She turned her face towards
him and looked
searchingly into his dark-blue eyes.
"Of course not!" she replied.
"Why should I be?"
"Well, I was just thinking
of Thurber. I mean, he wouldn't be very
pleased to learn
that you ..."
"Oh, don't be such a prig! You needn't worry about Martin.
It's what you feel that interests me. For
instance,
whether you really like
me."
"Naturally.
I like you very much."
"Sincerely?"
"Of course."
She smiled her relief and
extended a
friendly hand to his back, which she then proceeded to stroke. "And I like you very much, too!"
she averred. "In fact, I might even
be in love with you."
"What, already?"
"Why not?"
He swallowed hard and turned
away from her
gaze. It came as a sort of embarrassing
shock to him, this admission on her part.
She was bluffing, surely?
"But didn't you come here solely on Thurber's behalf?" he
stated.
"Yes, I believe so," she
admitted, though, in truth, she didn't want to be reminded of the fact. "I came to blubber on your shoulder and
seek advice."
"Which is something, alas,
that I
haven't given you!" he confessed, blushing slightly.
"But, really, what a double-crossing
bastard
"He might," Greta
reluctantly
conceded. "But, even so, I
shouldn't have been obliged to prostitute myself just to get his
co-operation."
"Indeed not!" Logan
concurred in
a tone of righteous indignation, which partly resulted from sympathy
towards
Greta and partly from disgust that Mr Hurst had actually got his hands
on her
and more than his hands inside her - no doubt, in a barbarously callous
manner. "But we shouldn't allow him
to get off scot-free from what he's done," he added.
"So what can we do?" Greta
murmured, evidently perplexed.
"You haven't told Thurber
about
it?"
"I could hardly do that!"
"No, I suppose it would be
rather hard
on him,"
"Perhaps," Greta rejoined,
following a short but anguished pause.
"Though I rather suspect that he would deny it or claim I was
exaggerating."
"But surely she would be
suspicious of
him?"
"Possibly.
Yet, there again, we can't be certain that he
hasn't been unfaithful to her before, nor that she would necessarily be
surprised or offended by the fact.
Besides, I shouldn't wish to be the person to confess to having
had sex
with her husband. If she did get angry,
she'd more than likely take it out on me, not him!
And if I don't confess to it, who else
can? Not you, for one.
And not Martin Thurber either, for the simple
reason that I can't bring myself to tell him.
So either way we're stumped."
"What a pity!" Logan
declared
lamely, casting her a sympathetic glance.
"Not that it's the end of the world. I
mean
he only had sex with you, after
all."
Greta reluctantly nodded in
the teeth of
her compunction. For her self-esteem was
still smarting from the way Hurst had
actually
had sex with her, and it now struck her, in the light of what had
happened this
evening, that, sexually considered, Hurst and Logan were as far apart
as they
were politically and even socially.
"Yes, I suppose he can't exactly be accused of a crime there,"
she said, a shade reluctantly, "even though the age is more partial, in
its rampant secularity, to transmuting sins into crimes.
But it's poor Martin that I'm essentially
worried about. For now that he's without
a magazine to contribute anything to ..."
"What about the one you
contribute
articles to?"
"You mean 'The Arts'?"
"Yes, doesn't it publish art
reviews
too?"
"It does.
But it's run by Colin Patmore,
and he's a friend of Mr Hurst's. More
than a friend actually - in fact, his brother-in-law."
"Oh really?"
"You really think so?"
"Yes."
The young woman raised
herself from the
carpet and sat beside
"Well?" he pressed her.
"Oh, I don't know, it all
sounds too
simple," she rejoined on a sceptical note.
"He might just as easily phone Mr Hurst in order to find out
whether I was bluffing him."
"Would that make any
difference?"
"It might do."
"Not if he was fonder of his
sister,
surely?"
"Yes, but, really, in this
day and age
people are being unfaithful to one another all the fucking time!" Greta
angrily asseverated.
"Are they?"
There then followed an uncomfortable silence,
during which Logan had an opportunity to reflect on his own behaviour
that
evening - non-adulterous though it was - and to some extent swallow his
words. He felt momentarily ashamed of
himself again and anxious to change the subject. "Well,
whatever
the outcome, you can but
try, and see what happens," he advised her. "If
Patmore
publishes your stories and you generally get on with him, there's
always a
chance that he'll accept. After all, he
may not be as friendly towards
Greta had to admit that that
was a
possibility, albeit not a particularly reassuring one.
Still, there could be no harm in giving Patmore
a try, since he had never shown any hostility
towards her in the past. Nor, for that
matter, towards Thurber, whom he had spoken to at
"Yes or, rather, listened to
what I
had to say about literature and modern art," the avant-garde novelist
confirmed.
"And what kind of impression
did you
form of him?" Greta wanted to know.
"He seemed more tolerant and
intelligent, on the whole, than Mr Hurst, as well as more sympathetic
towards
what I write,"
Greta looked agreeably
surprised. "And so would I," she
declared. "I still can't believe
it's for real."
Logan blushed faintly and
offered her a
conciliatory smile, saying: "If you're really interested in seeing it,
there's a copy of my latest novel over there." He
pointed
in the direction of a small glass
table a few yards to their right, on which a couple of music magazines
and an
average-sized paperback with a purple cover could be seen.
"May I?"
"Sure."
She got to her feet,
smoothed her tight
miniskirt back into place, and walked briskly across to the table,
picked up
the paperback without looking at its title, and just as briskly
returned to her
place beside him. She was smiling
continually, for she still couldn't take the idea of a completely
senseless
literature seriously. "Is that
the
title?" she asked, referring his attention to the large gold lettering
on
the cover.
"Yes," he admitted, nodding. "Would you like me to read some of the
first chapter for you, or are you going to brave it out yourself?"
"I think I'll have a go at
it,"
she decided, and, turning to page one of 'Endings', began, in as steady
and
serious a tone-of-voice as she could muster, to read: "'Saturday the
thanking green has over, papers big a run, incident boy never gong. Thoughtful, poseur greetings the think
abstraction, nothing sake badgers, boats, verbs, yes goodbye were
quickly, left
forces night on large. He, the your of
red, so show too most, gaseous they Wednesday.
Nothing went passing. Why on
thanks, could mine ran, high, blue caught off head, nightly grow bed
then
single through an. No, I yesterday gash
bog out whose fainting, though said why a nervous sad, but car over nod. Grace mode privately up church.
Took and bright, regrettably leg cosy where
do, hit a blue, sanction bag to sat. Never
paint got hopefully mouse. He's, might
order off light, bat fifty, toes tall nowhere more and.
To anus bad pinkly dust, was because, in
doctor neither nearest calling inasmuch ring.
Doubtless, themselves has why I movement caught it so larger. Is grew that blossoming fresh, the Margaret
hope fretfully bellows of stout, so but.
Everywhere out priest, forty countenance sparking too crowd,
aghast left
my lofty, gasp, presumably pen colouring could ...'
Why, it doesn't even begin
to make
sense!" she exclaimed, shaking her head in patent disbelief, as she
abandoned the text before she had even reached the end of the first
paragraph. "And you write like this
throughout the book?"
"That's right,"
"As I can well imagine!"
cried
Greta, scarcely bothering to disguise her bewilderment.
"I haven't read anything even remotely
resembling it before."
"Neither have most people,"
Greta raised archly
incredulous
eyebrows. "Don't you really mean
devolved?" she objected.
"'Evolved' is what I said
and 'evolved'
is what I meant," he smilingly assured her. "At
present
they're still tied to more
traditional, and hence narrative, forms of literary communication,
which is
doubtless as it should be. But a time
must surely come when man will be above language and given, instead, to
pure
knowledge, pure contemplation of the Infinite, in accordance with his
desire
for ultimate salvation in a spirituality transcending the word, not to
mention
the world."
"As you told me at Mr
Hurst's
place," Greta reminded him, showing signs of impatience with what
struck
her, in spite of her liking for him, as a crackpot notion.
"Yes, so I did," he
confirmed. "And so man won't want
to distract himself from his ultimate destiny by getting caught-up or
bogged-down in verbal concepts. He'll
know that speech and words in general are ultimately irrelevant to his
spiritual salvation - indeed, could be a grave obstacle to it if
indulged in as
formerly. So he'll gradually free
himself from their influence over him, one of the ways of doing so
being to
read words deprived of their customary status as meaningful components
of
syntactic sentences and reduced, instead, to their bare bones, as it
were, in a
largely if not totally abstract arrangement.
He will become conscious of words as words rather than
as
meanings, or concepts denoting subject/object relationships, and
gradually be
weaned of his dependence on them as vehicles for representational
communication. One might say that this
mode of writing will act as a kind of transition between traditional
communicative language and the pure contemplation which stands above it. Simply a means of breaking down our
traditional dependence on concepts.
However, the widespread reading of such works won't come about
for some
time yet - of that you can rest assured!"
A broad smile of ironic
relief erupted
across Greta's face in spite of her endeavour to take what he was
saying
seriously. "As I think you said at
Mr Hurst's party," she reminded him.
"Such abstract works could only appeal, at present, to a tiny
minority of, what, advanced intellectuals?"
"Advanced by comparison with
the broad
reading public, though not particularly advanced by any ultimate
standards,"
Greta Ryan smiled her
dubious appreciation
of
CHAPTER
NINE
Martin
Thurber
drew
himself up closer to Greta on the settee and placed a tender kiss
on her brow, then one on her nearest cheek, then another, and, finally,
a
longer and more daring one on her lips.
"Careful, you'll ruin my
appearance!" she lightly chided him, making to turn her face away from
his
kissings and gently repulse his advancing
fingers.
"And what kind of an
appearance is
that?" he teased, smiling ironically.
"You know perfectly well!"
she
exclaimed, a look of mild reproof in her large cat-like eyes.
He smiled complacently and
cast a critical
squint over the appearance in question - her delicately powdered face,
with but
a hint of faint eye shadow and pale lipstick.
Her tied-up mass of fine brown hair.
Her dark-green earrings and, of course, her white blouse and
closely
pleated grey skirt, with appropriately dark-blue stockings and black
shoes to
complete the external impression of ladylike primness.
Underneath her skirt - ah, that he couldn't
be sure of, since the effort he made to find out had been firmly
repulsed,
albeit in good humour and with a view to protecting, at all costs, the
prosaic
facade. Doubtless she wanted to whet his
curiosity and keep him in suspense for the rest of the evening or, at
any rate,
until such time as their guests had departed and he was accordingly
free to
explore her baser self, to bring out the beast in her, in deference to
his
customary animal wants. Well, if that
was the case, he would just have to be patient and await the hour when
everything would be revealed. In all
probability, her stuffy grey skirt cloaked a red cotton G-string or a
pair of
sexy pink nylon panties or even, as on occasion, a pair of silk French
knickers. He knew more or less what to
expect by now, despite her unquestionable resourcefulness.
It was an old game anyway - in fact, so old
that it hardly held any charm for him anymore.
Maybe one of these days he would grow completely blasé and get
her to
reverse roles or just tell her to damn-well please herself and wear
what she
fucking-well liked - assuming she would still be capable of independent
judgement! Yet, in all likelihood,
things would continue to drag on as they had done during the better
part of
these past 8-9 months. She would remain
the public lady as well as the private whore.
"Well, I guess I'm just
bubbling over
with gratitude and admiration this evening," he at length confessed,
still
smiling, "and can't do enough to let you know. To
think
Colin Patmore
should have been only too pleased to grant you your request and publish
my
review in his magazine - really, I can hardly believe my luck! Were it not for the fact that the latest
edition of 'The Arts' is right there on the table with my review in it,
I'm
sure I'd still think you were bluffing.
Despite what you told me last week, I just couldn't bring myself
to
actually believe it until the new edition came out and I received
concrete confirmation
of the fact. On the contrary, I was
under the impression that Patmore would be
the last
person to publish me in
"True, but I don't think we
have any
reason to believe that they're the best of friends either," Greta
remarked. "Colin Patmore
has a mind of his own and isn't his
brother-in-law's arsewiper.
When I mentioned your review to him, he
simply said he'd be interested to read it.
But I got the impression that he would almost certainly oblige,
even
before he formally agreed to it. I think
he's secretly jealous of
"Yes, I suppose so," Thurber
agreed, nodding deferentially.
"Though he has never said anything about it to me in the past. On the relatively few occasions when we
happened to meet, we've always contrived to speak about other things
than
either my art criticism or his publishing - which, between ourselves,
is
probably just as well! But, still, there
may be something in what you say.
Personally, I've never had cause to doubt his intelligence and,
so far
as art in general is concerned, he's certainly well-informed. Knows as much about its history as anyone I
know, and more, I should think, than ever
"I quite agree," said Greta. "And we can guess what is most likely to
happen, can't we?"
"Yes, which will serve him
bloody-well
right!" Thurber asseverated.
"And I would be the last person to feel any sympathy for him. Indeed, I've a good mind to send him a copy
of Mr Patmore's magazine, so that he can
see my
review in print."
Greta smiled wryly. "He might already have seen it and decided
never to talk to his brother-in-law again," she commented.
"Yes, that's a more than
vague
possibility," Thurber conceded, chuckling roguishly.
"Though I don't think he would bear Patmore
a grudge for long - not if his wife had any say in
the matter anyway. Besides, whenever
they hold parties, she always sees to it that her brother is invited. So it wouldn't do
Greta blushed slightly, in
spite of making
a determined attempt at remaining cool, and did her best to hide her
face from
Thurber. Her influence on Colin Patmore wasn't a subject she particularly cared
to enlarge
upon - not with him, at any rate!
"Oh, I can assure you it was no trouble," she murmured,
endeavouring
to camouflage her embarrassment with a conciliatory smile.
"At heart, he's one of the most generous
and kind men."
"I begin to believe you may
well be
right," said Thurber innocently, and, overcome once more by a wave of
gratitude, he planted a firm kiss on Greta's nearest cheek, which had
the
effect of causing her to blush anew, this time more deeply.
However, at that moment
there was a sudden
sharp buzz from the doorbell and, mindful of the fact that they were
expecting visitors,
he abandoned Greta and went to answer it, leaving her to readjust her
sartorial
appearance and cool herself down again.
Their visitors, none other than Paul Fleshman
and Yvette Sanderson, were enthusiastically admitted and led into the
lounge, where
they received a cordial welcome from Thurber's girlfriend, now much
more in
control of herself. In fact, their
presence on the scene came as a welcome relief to her, and she wasted
no time
in letting them know it. Even Thurber
must have been surprised by her readiness to fetch them drinks and find
out how
they were keeping, despite his own obvious delight in their presence -
a
delight, in large measure, attributable to the publication of his
review of Fleshman's exhibition which, so
it transpired, the artist
had already read, having purchased a copy of 'The Arts' earlier that
day. Indeed, as soon as he was comfortably
seated,
Fleshman made it his first priority to
inform the art
critic of just how much he had been impressed by his review - more
impressed,
in fact, than by anything else Thurber had ever written of him. "To begin with, I found it difficult to
believe that you were its actual author," he confessed.
"For it seemed to reveal an
understanding of my work and intentions that even you, with all your
considerable knowledge of modern art, have rarely professed to in the
past,
notwithstanding your sympathetic interest."
This time it was Thurber's
turn to blush,
since he was only too conscious of the extent to which the review had
fallen
under an alien influence and of how indebted he was, in consequence, to
Logan's
unwitting assistance for the final product.
Then, too, Fleshman's praise
sounded
suspiciously like irony to him, as though the artist was in no doubt
that he
had really been assisted by someone but preferred, out of tactful
politeness,
not to say so. "Well, in point of
fact, I did borrow one or two of Keith Logan's opinions," he at length
admitted, turning scarlet. "For the
most part, however, the review is my own."
He couldn't force himself to admit the whole truth, nor to
completely
lie about the matter, at least not with Greta there, so he opted for
this
lukewarm compromise, which seemed easier to bear.
"Ah yes, I'd quite forgotten
that Mr
Logan visited the Fairborne Gallery with
you,"
the artist confessed, allowing a cloud of disappointment to momentarily
pass
across his wrinkled face. "However,
that takes nothing away from your achievement, which does more justice
to me
than most other critics have done in recent years, I can assure you."
"I'm sincerely relieved to
hear
it," said Thurber, though, in reality, he now regretted that he had
lacked
the courage or audacity to completely lie about the matter, since it
seemed
that Fleshman hadn't been ironic after
all, but, in
all innocence, genuinely believed him to be the sole author of the
review. Now, in spite of his generous
praise, it was
all too evident that the artist was really quite disappointed for
having been
proved wrong.
"By the way, where is
Keith
Logan tonight?" asked Yvette, desiring to change the subject. She was sitting next to Greta on the settee
and had automatically addressed herself to Thurber, who sat directly
opposite
her in one of the room's two armchairs.
"I thought you would have invited him over, too," she added.
"Well, in point of fact, we had
thought of
doing so," Thurber replied, looking uneasy, "but finally decided
against it on the grounds that he would probably get into one of his
overly
didactic moods and dominate the conversation with his views on art,
religion,
politics, etc., to the detriment of everyone else.
To put it frankly, we preferred the prospect
of a nice, quiet, friendly, uneducative
evening in
the company of old friends, to a controversially intellectual one in
Logan's
radical company." Which, to some
extent, was perfectly true, though the real motive, revolving around
the desire
not to have the chief architect of the review present at the same time
as Fleshman, was hardly one to be imparted
to his guests, and
Thurber wisely refrained from doing so, even though the telling of yet
another
untruth caused him some further emotional discomfiture!
However, Yvette seemed
satisfied by his
reply and nodded in apparent sympathy.
She hadn't found
"I can't say that I really
minded his
conversation," he declared, turning towards Thurber.
"On the contrary, I found it
refreshingly positive, especially what he said about the progress of
art - a
subject which has been considered in some depth, albeit in slightly
different
terms, by Miss Suzi Gablik,
whose
book
Progress
in
Art I'm currently re-reading. Had it
not been for that, I doubt whether I'd
now be feeling quite as proud of myself - that's to say, proud to be a
light
artist whose approximation to and/or intimation of ultimate truth is
apparently
much closer than anything attempted by artists in the past, including
the very
best of them. Really, it was most
reassuring to learn as much, particularly as I'd previously been the
victim of
self-doubt and a nagging disillusionment with the whole trend of
contemporary
art, particularly the light-art aspect of it.
Now, however, I've sound reasons for believing that everything
is
working-out for the best, and that my own art, or at any rate the more
radical
examples of it, can be further improved upon in the course of time - in
other words,
transcended by yet more radical projects.
A purer and brighter light, concentrated in patterns of greater
complexity, should produce an even closer intimation of ultimate truth,
and
thus firmly establish me not just on the pinnacle of contemporary art
but, ipso
facto, on the pinnacle of all art to-date. What could be more spiritually gratifying
than that?"
Thurber nodded
appreciatively. "Yes, there's certainly
something
encouraging about such a prospect," he admitted, "and I'm confident
that you'll continue to develop for the better, in accordance with your
growing
predilection for light works. Whether or
not you'll become the world's greatest artist, I don't know. But, providing you don't relapse into
representational art, you should at least remain among the leaders." He paused a moment, as though for breath,
before continuing: "As regards representational art, on the other hand,
I've latterly come to the informed opinion that, in terms of sheer
technical
brilliance and imaginative scope, Salvador Dali is the world's greatest
artist
to-date - greater even than Bruegel, Dürer, Raphael, Tintoretto,
Velazquez,
Poussin, Rubens, Rembrandt, Delacroix,
Turner, and Cezanne."
Fleshman
raised
his bushy brows in a gesture of sceptical astonishment.
"You may have a point there," he
warily conceded, following a rather anguished pause, "and I'm sure
there
are many people who would share your opinion.
Strangely, I've never seriously considered Dali's status in
relation to
the aesthetic tradition. Naturally, I've
been aware that, in representational terms, he's usually regarded by
the more
Catholic artists and critics as the greatest Spanish artist of the
twentieth
century, greater even than Picasso, who was comparatively heathenistic. But
whether or not he can therefore be
considered the ultimate master of representational art ... is quite
another
thing. Doubtless, the criteria you put
forward have some merit and deserve to be taken seriously ..."
"Especially as regards
imaginative
scope, which, at times, is completely out-of-this-world," Yvette
interposed, leaning forwards. "One
wonders how he managed to think up so many interesting ideas."
"Yes, I know what you mean,"
Thurber responded. "One is made
acutely aware, by Dali's best works, of the nature of genius, which may
be
defined in terms of the superhuman. The
man's imaginative and technical capacities are so far above the average
level
... as to appear positively godlike..... Not that Keith Logan would
like to
hear me use that term in relation to creative greatness.
Nonetheless, an analogue with the
more-than-human prevails. Or to speak
more literally, and in terms which Logan would doubtless prefer to
hear, were
he with us tonight, one should say that genius presupposes a great man,
and
that it's therefore the fact of Dali's greatness which is brought home
to one
through the contemplation of several of his works."
Fleshman
nodded
his large head in unequivocal agreement.
"Most intelligent people would certainly agree with you
there," he affirmed, "even though a number of the more democratically
minded might be unsympathetic, these days, towards the concept of human
greatness, and accordingly desirous that such a phenomenon should
quickly
disappear from the world, associated, as it all-too-easily can be, with
autocratic power."
"I, for one!" cried Greta
somewhat impulsively.
"Yes, well, it may be that
Dali
represents the end of an old tradition of egocentric creativity rather
than the
beginnings of something new," Fleshman
rejoined,
"whereas, in my consistent allegiance to a variety of
non-representational
tendencies, I am aligned with the new, and consequently indisposed to Dalian criteria of greatness.
My criteria, on the contrary, are decidedly
post-egocentric, and therefore germane to the superconscious. Unlike Dali and the Surrealists generally, I
don't delve into the subconscious for my material, but aspire towards
the inner
light. Which is why, I suppose, that my
work is intrinsically superior to his, since it accords with a higher
phase of
human evolution, a phase in which man approximates to the godlike
instead of
remaining bound to the human and, in particular, to the greatly human. No longer the works of a great man, but of
man growing steadily closer to the godlike in superconscious
one-sidedness. That's what chiefly
distinguishes the new from the old, the post-egocentric from the
egocentric. Though in Dali's case - as,
indeed, in the cases of many other representational artists - the
psychological
stance is less egocentric than incipiently post-egocentric, so that he
tended
to look back and down on the subconscious from a slight psychological
elevation
over it, and thus produced surrealism.
"Alternatively, an artist in
such a
position could, if he chose, decide to concentrate not on the internal,
or
psychical, manifestation of subconscious life, but on its external, or
physical, manifestation," Fleshman went
on,
warming still further to his argument, "and thus produce modern
landscape
painting, which could be defined as the extrovert equivalent of
surrealism. For example, Paul Nash has
artfully combined natural with surreal elements in a number of works,
and may
therefore be described as a dualistic introvert/extrovert artist of the
subconscious domain. On the other hand,
Ben Nicholson has drawn both landscapes and painted abstract reliefs throughout his career, and would seem to
be an
artist of both the subconscious and
the superconscious domains, which, in an
age of transition from
the old to the new, needn't particularly surprise us.
Having begun in a naturalistic framework, Piet
Mondrian completely
dedicated his mature creative life to abstraction, and may therefore be
regarded as primarily an artist of the superconscious
domain - an artist superior in essence to both Nash and Nicholson, not
to
mention Dali."
"What a fascinating
contention!"
Thurber exclaimed, beaming an admiring and excited look directly at the
artist. "Because Mondrian
was more consistently forward-looking than
Nicholson and, unlike both Nash and Dali in their separate ways, not at
all
interested in the subconscious domain.
Yes, it begins to make sense! And
presumably anyone who, like yourself, had evolved from painterly
abstraction to
light art would be Mondrian's superior,
since on a
higher and more genuine level of superconscious
affiliation?"
"That's quite possible," Fleshman conceded, smiling proudly.
"And certainly congruous with the import
of
"Yes, I can well imagine,"
said
Thurber sympathetically. "Though,
if the internal or introvert manifestations of superconscious
affiliation prove too much for a given temperament, there are always
the
external or extrovert alternatives, which take the forms of Modern
Realism,
Photo-Realism, Socialist Realism, or whatever - in other words,
paintings of
the cityscape, tools, machines, modern industrial appliances or
products, and
modern city-dwellers, such as one finds in Joseph Philpott,
your
colleague-in-competition
at the Fairborne
exhibition. For this species of
representational art is, according to Keith Logan, the highest form of
representation of which the human race has ever conceived, and one
destined to
eclipse all the other forms, especially those associated with nature or
natural
phenomena. It isn't representational art
per
se which is outmoded, but only a particular kind of
representation - in other words, that which adheres to the
subconscious,
whether internally or externally. The
cityscape, however, is the non-sensuous environment of modern man, and
should
accordingly be depicted as such. It
gives rise to a form of secular art which complements the religious art
of
abstraction, especially the most advanced and superconsciously-biased
modes
of
abstraction. Thus both the
external and internal worlds are catered for, now as previously. But, as
"Which is fundamentally
nothing less
than the difference between woman and man," Fleshman
contended, casting both Greta and Yvette ironically appreciative
glances. "As Oscar Wilde so eloquently put
it:
'Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent
the
triumph of mind over morals', though I fear he was simply being
facetious in
regard to the latter who, regarded more philosophically, should really
be
equated with the triumph of mind over matter, in complete contrast to
women!"
"Oh come now, Paul, we're
not all
devoid of spiritual leanings!" Yvette protested, standing-up for her
sex,
both literally and metaphorically speaking, since she had in fact risen
to her
feet as though to cuff him.
"I'm not for one instant
suggesting
that you are," the artist retorted, drawing back, "but am simply
generalizing both men and women into what has traditionally been and,
to a
certain extent, still continues to be the case.
God knows, most women have no shortage of drive, if you
interpret spirit
in that sense, though usually it's their external beauty - and hence
appearance
- which is the governing factor. A woman
who was more centred in essence than in appearance wouldn't really be a
woman
at all, but a sort of man in disguise.
Yet most women, it goes without saying, are fundamentally
womanly, and
thus function in the realm of appearances as a means to an end - the
means in
their case being the propagation of the species, and the end apparently
being
the male-led attainment of that species to the transcendental Beyond
or, as
some would evidently prefer to call it, the post-human millennium."
"Yes, and where modern art
is
concerned," said Thurber, nodding deferentially, "I should think that
a majority of women would be more at home in the realm of Modern
Realism, or
for that matter any other contemporary mode of realism, than in
abstraction,
and thus be more inclined to appreciate a representational canvas of,
say, a
modern cityscape than a geometrically abstract canvas after the manner
of Piet Mondrian. They might pretend otherwise, but I'm
positively convinced that, deep down, the representational one, dealing
in
phenomenal appearances, in corporeal actualities, would be more in
their
line." He turned a mildly quizzical
eye on the two occupants of the settee.
"Well, isn't that so?"
The women smiled guardedly,
almost
begrudgingly, and confessed that it probably was - at least so far as
the
generality of relatively unliberated women
were
concerned, since women were, for the most part, intrinsically different
from
and even contrary to men, despite all the feminist hype and rhetoric of
recent
decades. Greta even had the honesty to
admit, albeit humorously, that she was generally more at home with the
superficial than with the profound aspect of things.
"Which is perfectly as it
should
be," Fleshman averred, a broad smile on
his
lips. "For women are fundamentally
more at home in the world than men, who, for all their show of power,
are
essentially other-worldly rebels against it and conscious or
unconscious
millennial pioneers, strivers after increased essence and, if we're to
believe
Mr Logan, destined for spiritual transformation at the culmination of
human
evolution in the distant future."
"And snogging
good luck to them!" jeered Greta, chuckling softly.
For at that moment she recalled both the
small room in which Keith Logan practised meditation and her initial
rather
puzzled and, at the same time, secretly amused response to its dazzling
whiteness and even more dazzling fluorescent tubes which, positioned in
three
equidistant parallel rows on the ceiling, like some kind of
transcendent
trinity, kept the room relatively free of shadow while heightening the
brightness of walls, ceiling, and carpet, the latter of which, needless
to say,
was also white. Apart from a wooden stool,
painted white, the room was completely empty, like an Ivres
Klein void, and it was in this simulated context of ultimate
spirituality ...
that the abstract novelist, dressed in all-white attire, paradoxically
strove
to obtain an inner glimpse of pure superconscious
mind and thereby firmly establish himself on the last stretch of the
long and
often perilous road to what he called the post-human millennium.
However, despite or perhaps
because of the
white room and its complement of neon lighting, he was apparently still
awaiting a glimpse of the psychic 'promised land' which lay ahead in
the far
distance of man's spiritual evolution.
Awaiting it but conscious, too, that it would be much greater
than
anything his progressive imagination could conceive of - a universal
convergence, as it were, of superconscious
mind about
a central axis of transcendent bliss, in which all distinctions of mine
and thine had ceased to exist, and only
the pure light of
heavenly contemplation remained, as an eternal refutation of empirical
objectivity. But when he had introduced
her to his sanctuary, following their intimacies, he hadn't even
bothered to
put all his clothes on again, and consequently there was something
ironical in
his desire to show it to her, since his previous actions as a lover,
albeit a
rather passive one, were in marked contrast with his spiritual
ambitions and
seemed, under the circumstances, to detract from their credibility.
Yet, despite her interest in
his room, Greta
couldn't help smiling to herself and reflecting on what he had said at Fleshman's place, in regard to The
Devils
of
Loudun, about the mistake Father Surin had made in trying to be too spiritual for
his time, not
to mention his own good, and paying the price through a mental
derangement and
nervous breakdown. Perhaps Keith Logan
had come dangerously close to being another Father Surin
and had accordingly sought and found in her body a sensuous
counterweight which
had released him, temporarily, from the danger of running
transcendentally too
far ahead of himself, so to speak? Yet
perhaps, because of his spiritual pretensions, he had not wished her to
get
that impression but, on the contrary, had elected to show off his
meditation
room in order to impress upon her the fact of his metaphysical essence
and thus
justify his rather passive approach to sex, reminding her of who or
what he
really was or imagined himself to be? Then
perhaps, too, that was the real reason why he had not suggested any
further
meetings, but remained rather noncommittal on the subject of renewing
their
liaison - not, as he would have preferred her to believe, on account of
Thurber? Yes, but, then again, she had
no way of knowing for sure.
Nevertheless Greta was
convinced that, if
he thought he could dispense with women on a regular basis, he was
certainly
making a big mistake - of that she had little doubt!
Let him have his mystical pretensions by all
means, but not to the extent that he endangered his existence as a man
and was
reduced to anything but a god. Let him
practise what he preached, ever mindful of the fact that ultimate
salvation
couldn't be gate-crashed but had to be worked towards, over the
generations, a
little at a time, with due respect to one's senses and the external
world while
such respect was still due. Let him
face-up to his responsibilities towards himself as a man while he was
still a
man and not yet a god; which, to judge by the alacrity with which he
had set
about having sex with her that evening, he was perfectly capable of
doing. In fact, as capable, in his own
rather gentle
fashion, as just about anyone she had ever known, including the rather
more
vigorously heterosexual Martin Thurber, who, at that very moment, was
as far
removed from thoughts about her body as he had ever been, despite his
childish
impatience to explore it, prior to Fleshman's
arrival.
"Yes, I've recently come to
a similar
conclusion myself," he was saying, principally, it appeared, to the
artist, "and am now inclined to equate such work as you do - and,
indeed,
abstract art in general - with a theocratic turn-of-mind, whereas
representational art, both ancient and modern, may be said to reflect a
fundamentally democratic if not autocratic outlook, even when, as is
increasingly becoming the case, it depicts tall skyscrapers and heavy
machinery. Thus I would be inclined to
describe you as a theocratic artist but Joseph Philpott
as a democratic or, at any rate, a predominantly democratic one, as the
majority of his canvases at the Fairborne
Gallery
would adequately attest."
"Which is just another way
of saying
religious and secular," Fleshman remarked,
smiling engagingly.
"Or male and female," Yvette
suggested ironically.
"And therefore essential and
apparent," Thurber concurred, with a briskly deferential nod to the
female
in question, who happened to be highly apparent in her sensuous
femininity. "Always bearing in
mind, however, that the trend of evolution is from the subconscious to
the superconscious, and that any art,
whether autocratic or
theocratic or even a democratic cross between the two, which reflects
this
trend is justified, no matter who the artist.
I would never dream of rating Philpott's
work
above yours, Paul. All the same, I'd be
the last person to consider his species of artificial representation
anachronistic. Provided he doesn't
degenerate into painting public parks, his cityscapes will remain
relevant for
some time to-come - in fact, as long as the liberal civilization which
gave
rise to them in the full-flowering of its lunar phase."
With this somewhat esoteric comment Thurber
hesitated in his verbal tracks, as though to pause for breath and
reflection,
before continuing: "But the last and ultimate say in art - ah! I should
be
very surprised if that fell to Philpott
or, indeed,
to any of his representational successors.
On the contrary, that can only fall to the most idealistic of
artists,
the one whose light shines inwardly the purest!
And who can say, for certain, when the day of the final say will
come? Not I, Paul. And,
if
you're completely honest with
yourself, not you either, despite your radical status."
"No, and not Keith Logan
either,
despite his radical status as a thinker whose opinions have, for better
or
worse, recently conditioned our own," Fleshman
declared.
"And so much so," Greta
observed,
"that his absence here tonight is hardly missed! For
we
have experienced anything but the
'nice, quiet, friendly, uneducative'
evening that
Martin had in mind. On the contrary,
we've simply endeavoured to outdo
"And succeeded quite
admirably, so far
as you two men are concerned," Yvette opined, with a broad smile.
"Yes, I suppose you could
say
that!" Thurber conceded, smiling faintly.
Though he didn't, for one blessed moment, really believe it!
EPILOGUE
Keith
Logan
had
just come out of a busy book shop on the Charing Cross Road and had
then
decided to turn up towards Tottenham Court Road when, much to his
surprise, he
spotted Greta Ryan across the other side of the street, standing on the
edge of
the crowded pavement and staring along it as though in expectation of
someone
or something to arrive. Automatically,
he waved his hand to attract her attention; for he hadn't seen her
since the
night she called on him about Thurber, several days ago, and suddenly
desired
to talk to her again and find out what, if anything, had happened in
the
meantime.
Eventually his wave
succeeded in its
objective, but, to his utter surprise, she blushed violently and
quickly turned
her face away. He could scarcely believe
his eyes! Then, just as he was on the
verge of calling out her name, a taxi drew up alongside the curb by
which she
was standing and a man whom he hadn't noticed before suddenly stepped
out of
the crowd to open its rear door and give the cabby instructions. His face looked grave and slightly
embarrassed, as he fairly pushed Greta into the taxi and quickly got in
after
her.
Where had
