The Null Set, chapter from Work in Progress

 The blindfold is surprisingly effective. I wave my hand in front of my face and perceive a shadow image of its passing. No light leaks through from the bottom. Nothing. Perfect darkness. And yet there is this vague image of my hand; my brain, not my eyes, tracking its motion. A drawing class I took years ago. An exercise we did. We sat facing a reflective screen. In front of us, a large pad of newsprint, in our hands, a stick of charcoal. The room had been specially prepared; blackout curtains on the windows; doors were draped so no light could seep under or around them; a single pinpoint of red light over the screen, lest we become disoriented in the five minutes or so of complete darkness while we waited for our eyes to adapt and the signal for the exercise to begin. The drawing master--Simone, I think his name was Simone--had a slide projector fitted with a mechanism that coordinated a graduated adjustment, rheostat with the lens, increasing light proportionately as the image came into focus. The projection would begin as a blur at the threshold of visibility. Over an interval of ten minutes, the light would grow brighter, the focus sharper. Unable at first to recognize anything--like peering into a thick fog on a moonless night; we were to try to represent what we saw as it developed: an exercise in pure, unmediated vision﷓﷓, shades of light and dark creating forms with no identifiable figuration--to record the picture as it emerged. Only in the final seconds, when the light was sufficient to see what our efforts had rendered. was it possible to recognize what we had been copying: a reproduction of a drawing or print would come into focus: a landscape, a still life, a photograph of a nude model. The lights would go on, and the exercise would be over.

Blind to the present, my mind drifts back in time. I am fishing on Lake Michigan with my father in his boat. This is shortly before he will die. My parents had bought a retirement cottage not far from Grand Rapids and my mother had sent me bus fare hoping for a reconciliation. The light on the water, that silvered turquoise water, the peaks of the waves glisten in the sun--even the Voice is lulled to somnambulant slumber. I think of my mother--of that last summer, the summer before her final illness, while she is still herself--sitting on the porch--martini hour--watching the sunset over the lake, the jet skiers droning and whining like gigantic mechanized insects, a moment I wanted to go on forever. A tableaux that recedes into the distance, the light of stars that no longer exist.

Scanning. He keeps using that word. At The Fire. My eyes scan the horizon--the summer cumulus piling up in great columns over the lake, the boat rising and falling with the swells. He would scan the wall, he said--the wall full of pictures--until he found his focal point, sink into the Left Side of the World.

In my minds eye--it's a picture of a boat on the lake.

That moment of perfect clarity... what happened? Where did it go? Another waking from dreamless sleep, a silence we enter but cannot bring with us, from which we emerge bearing not a trace, as though it had not happened. I listen. The room is quiet--not even the sound of passing traffic on the street. Quiet, but never silent. The mind is always moving, the endless stream of words. To fall asleep, I turn them into images, and then I dream. Of dreamless sleep we have no memory. The Voice calls from the crevice of darkness, from the gates of death. I resist. I pretend to listen, to follow where it leads but where it turns left I turn right. I close the door of the room in my house of the dead. Living with others we shore up the walls of our existence, the walls that contain us, the waters of our being. Alone we bleed into the world, the outlines run and blur, we cannot tell where we begin and where we end. Was this what Blake feared? The strong lines define the figure. What he could not abide in Rembrandt. Now it comes back to me--how she stood out against the light, the strong contour of her neck and shoulder, her hands binding the wound on her arm--and again in the snow, black on white. I wanted touch, not as I touched the women I had loved, as I had touched Sorrell, falling into her, losing myself--no, to feel her resistance, to approach and feel the limiting wall, the edge of her silence. The strong lines that define the figure.

Silence--a word we can know nothing about, or know only as we know death, as metaphor, surmise, the nothingness that frames the span of our life, the before and after beyond experience, experience that is always filled with signs, signs that may not speak but are never silent. Think of the silence of the woman pouring milk. It is hers, in that room before that window, in the light that caresses her, in the shadows that surround her, but it is never ours. Reminds us at best of the presence of something we cannot know. The silence is in the painting, not in us; we know it only as an absence that draws us out of ourselves, like the silence that frames the lines of a poem. We read the words, read to the end of the line, to the end of the poem and encounter there that same absence. We call it silence, but the silence is on the page, in the white spaces between the words, it is not in us. It is never ours. Never. We say that we have come from silence, as we will return to silence. But our saying this is an admission that between birth and death there is no silence. Not for single second. Look into the eyes of an animal and you will see it--the impenetrable silence we are not permitted to enter, and if we were, if we could (perhaps again, as in dreamless sleep) we would emerge (again) with no trace, no memory of where we had been, no knowledge that we had been there. Is it possible, then, that we do enter but without knowing? Neither feel nor remember; the dark matter of our being--dark energy that does not interact, or only weakly with our voluble lives? We are left always with this intimation that there is something more, but we can never know or name what lies beyond it. How many times have I fallen through without knowing, into the silence, losing everything? Erased from the lives of others? Not even alone?

Figue has handed me a box. I didn't hear him enter the room. Has he been here all along? The box is filled with papers, clippings, photographs. I assume these are the pieces he removed from the wall. He stops behind me. I feel the cat pass between my legs. Figue unties the cloth. The light blinds me--from a kaleidoscope of imagined pasts into a present I cannot for the life of me imagine. I force myself to picture Wren, my Snow Angel... not as I imagined her but as she is.. Drive the image of Sorrell, the old Sorrell of dreams and silken scarves, drive it out of my head--but cannot. I tell Figue, promise him. I have no intention of harming her. As though he doesn't hear me. I swear to him that it's not what he thinks, but everything I say turns against me. I can't do this, I tell him. I cannot.

It's time, he says, and nothing more.