The painter I found to be an irrational man.
I, while I was still a young prospective doctor of the arts, dedicated my thesis to the study of the long-forgotten artist Carcinogenus.
I had to complete two undergraduate degrees first, the second more soul-deadening than the first. I conceived such a hatred and contempt for my fellows by the end of it that as soon as a given lecture had the grace to end I would charge for the closest exit to avoid having to meet any of their gazes. Everything about the academy disgusted me utterly: its sandstone corridors caked with dirt and dead leaves; its smug professors striding confidently about in their wood-and-plastic-panelled classrooms, in which legions of bored students would play at erudition as easily as they played on their mobile phones; the frequent events aimed at preserving some false echo of a long-dead social cohesion and the frankly pathetic amenities available to those with a true interest in education over frivolity.
One could have said I was a serious student, but I always thought of myself as average. It was the foolishness of others and their lack of dedication to anything they claimed to care about that made me appear studious by comparison and drew my ire more than anything else. Everything for which they paid and worked voluntarily seemed a burden to them. I wonder what drove them even now. Did they realise they had other choices? But these matters are not important.
Carcinogenus was the most self-absorbed and over-hyped artist to exist in a thousand years, renowned as a great humorist, though I have yet to discover what makes him funny. At this moment I am probably the world’s foremost expert on the subject of this painter. I have read his works in the original English, as well as numerous translations, to understand what others have thought of his words as well as his art. I have looked at his paintings for countless hours, and they cover every square inch of the walls in my house – little portraits, large landscape scenes, twisted, oddly-framed trapezoidal and mutable sketches in frames that seem tailor-made to fit into the spaces between my shelves and cupboards (of which there are few: I am frugal). I have mostly originals: they’re cheap, since I’m the only one who’d ever pay for Carcinogenus’ work in the first place.
His art can be studied from an infinite number of angles, and nothing new is gained from most of them, indeed any of them – it’s all formless, pointless, without rancour or joy. There is no point to any of it. It’s the exercise of a magical mediocrity.
How then did he become so well-loved? I am a cynic, inclined to criticise the taste of my day: in this case, however, the most important case of all since it concerns my work and way of life, and as a consequence was awkwardly brought up at a variety of dinner parties before I stopped attending them altogether, hardly am I allowed to jump to such a socially acceptable excuse, since nowadays I am the only one who has ever tried to pull the artist from his anonymous and well-hid grave. No, Carcinogenus cannot be blamed on our own time. His is the crime of another age long dead and unable thusly to appear in our modern court.
I have been lucky enough to secure a minor academic position at a university that sees nothing wrong with my chosen field of study, probably because it hasn’t looked too hard at what it is. I’m given to understand most of them aren’t scrutinised too closely; I believe one of my esteemed so-called coworkers is a direct intellectual descendant of Theodore Kazscinsky, and probably just as dangerous. He sends me mail frequently. I never open it.
In my spare time, when I am not contemplating Carcinogenus, I like to play Age of Empires II on a laptop with an ancient Intel Pentium processor and an unsalvageably cracked screen.
Many years have passed since I received my position, and nothing has changed. I study the pointless artist every day, and every day learn nothing about him, and no one else learns anything about him either. I teach several classes; Carcinogenus isn’t part of any of the courses. I have published no papers – no journal will accept them. I have published no books – the general public will never accept this, says the publishing house. The prevailing social consensus is that some corpses should not be exhumed, no matter the scientific interest involved.
On the rare occasions people approach me, wary, bored, and a little sceptical of the antisocial professor I am said to be, to ask about my chosen field of study, I divert them with lies about modern authors and the literature of the time, so the conversation can quickly turn to more accessible mediocrities. I am well-versed enough in them: a necessity for my daily bread.
One fruitlessly inspects his art for a lifetime, finding nothing and wasting time, to come to no resolution. And what fulfilment is gained from this? A kind of spiteful satisfaction, perhaps, that of Dostoevsky’s underground man foregoing his ill-deserved cakes, you might think. But I forego this spiteful pleasure too, and take refuge in something else.
It has unlocked no doors of perception for me, even as I progress from my straight-backed stride (I, too, am an academic, after all) to total reliance on a chipped and narrow cane, and I have long considered the question with reference to Carcinogenus’ ‘little pale book’ – termed so by the original publisher as an ironic commentary on his similarity to both Carl Jung and Mao Tse-tung, but with none of the fire that made either man.
You may recall I referred to him as irrational. I made this claim because of this little pale book, where he proclaims the earnest truth of one position on the recto, and then the inverse, argued just as passionately, on the verso. This is not accomplished in words. Rather, it’s a series of pathetic sketches that appear to have been scribbled while on a bumpy ride on public transport. In his letters, he called these sketches his aphorisms, and while there is something languid and terse about their composition, they are too pathetically trite to be given the same name as Nietzsche’s grand insights. Nor are they witty enough to be taken as jokes.
Some of these aphorisms’ subjects manage to escape the little pale book and end up frozen on a canvas, whereupon the artist’s almost Buddhist ability to strip the meaning and character from everything becomes more apparent than in the book, and the pressing blaze of the summer scene, or the floating sakura blossoms near the river, or the chorus of frogs in the city ruins, are revealed for the nihilistic nightmares they really are.
You may ask why entertaining different points of view makes one irrational: well, chiefly, it’s because of that earlier aforementioned tomfoolery: he takes the trite option of endless classification popular among prospective dictionary-makers of earlier centuries and tries to paint the opposite of the recto’s drawings on the verso. The frogs in the ruins become dragonflies, spaceships flying towards a floating, newly-built city in the sky; the sakura blossoms falling off the tree are a sweating workman gluing autumn leaves back onto a classic Canadian maple. This is irrational because there’s no basis for determining the opposite of any of the original ideas.
I wonder at the madness and chaos of Carcinogenus’ age, which I have studied so often in my pursuit of the man’s mind, and I find no answer as to how he became so well-loved by his peers, and was prophesied to last further into the future than even my own time. It may be considered the luck of history that, but for my untimely intervention (and this will be a short-lived phenomenon as I have utterly failed to drum up any new interest) this last prediction has been proven so drastically wrong. I know I am the last man who will ever study Carcinogenus.
I go on reading that little pale book, looking at those meaningless icons covering my walls, and instead of kneeling to pray before them, I knock them off the walls, wrinkled fists flailing at the cheap wooden slats, screaming, until I lie dazed and exhausted in a pile of ripped canvas and the blood from my own torn knuckles, my glasses broken and knocked askance, my thin, long hair clinging to the dirty carpet. There I pant and feel the broken frames of the paintings covering my body, a careless vain shroud. I hear a phantom chuckling.
Even here, at the end of my rational, long life, I find no answers, but only struggle on with this madman always ahead of me, laughing.
verso folio 