The Glacier at Night |
Issue 16
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We ran an afterschool art program, he and I.
We met at art school, when my life was dry as the bristles of my brush, the liquid in my paint-water cup clean enough to drink. I specialized in oil painting, he in ceramics. We calcined separately at first, but once we came to know one another, he fired and glazed me. Visual artists exist only in schools. They vanish after they graduate, replaced by part-timers and mid-level office workers. The doubles resemble the original artists plus a couple of years and crow’s feet. Artists hire them to condemn their bodies to the dangerous business of living. Artists do not do their own stunts. They linger backstage alone, so solitary that none can say for sure whether there is such a thing. But they are there. They are there. After we graduated, he and I hired afterschool teachers to double for us at our art program. Yet, before long, the children spilled over the audience’s rim and into something non-performative. They left the theater and they washed their hands at our sinks and they sat themselves at our coffee tables and they clasped our pillows close to their chests and the artists in us retired. The stunt work became the art, and the art became a memory. Years passed. One day, he had an announcement. “We’re going to do a language class now,” he said. To him, it was a matter of survival. Life or un-life. He never wanted to spin a wheel again. It was Latin that he suddenly felt compelled to teach. But it was not truly sudden, the way nothing is. The way a volcano erupts in a flash and a rumble, with barely a warning, despite resulting from forces that had been predictably but invisibly building. I had the limited perspective of a Vesuvius observer, one who saw an ordinary mountain one moment and a plume of ash the next, a cloud that spelled apocalypse in a black alphabet I had yet to understand. Unseen in the hot kiln of the world, fissures of crazing chipped at our magma glaze. “It’s the foundation for so many other languages,” he said. “I won’t have to choose between the Romance languages,” he said. “But it has to be languages,” he said. Neither of us understood the language. “Help me study,” he said. I wondered about his vision for the art instruction. He said, “You’re still thinking about that?” I did not help him study Latin. He taught it as well as a swim instructor who enjoyed floating down a river in a tube but lacked the courage to blow bubbles. I rinsed the kids’ brushes and cups alone. Insect carcasses accumulated along the edges of the kiln. The miraculous oven was cold and unmovable. It looked like a glacier and sounded like a moonbeam. “Ars longa, vita brevis,” he said. The parents understood the change in curriculum less than I did, but they also cared less. Of course they would have swooned over lumpy, blebbed vessels to place on their mantles, but they were just as happy for their children’s noodles to hold the Latin root for “vessel” instead. Years passed. One day, he had an announcement. “The kiddos need to move their bodies,” he said. “Have you seen what they eat these days?” he said. “They need a bona fide physical education class,” he said. I saw only the two of us, alone. “How about you teach it?” he said. More crazing in our glaze. “Perfectum est,” he said. I dipped my brush into the cup water, spun it like a skirt. The bracken tickled the bristles, licked the color off them, then flushed as if embarrassed from the intimacy of it. When a painter caresses a solid surface with a brush, it paints. When he caresses water with it, it unpaints. I did not teach physical education. “I can’t do this alone ad infinitum,” he said. I wondered about his vision for the art instruction. He said, “You’re still thinking about that?” The non sequitur of painting and Latin lasted and lasted and lasted. “You’ve had plenty of time to get used to this,” he said. He was not scolding me. I was not the child whose chin was flecked with crumbs of sweet chocolate contraband. No. I was the person looking into his dog’s eye as he closed the door between them. He was whimpering, powerless. This is all a metaphor. There was never any art class or Latin class. No paintbrush, no kiln. No crazing, no craziness. No monsters, no ocean. No years. No life. He said, “If you make this into a meta-commentary, I don’t think we’ll be able to work together.” The kiln looked like a glacier and sounded like a moonbeam. Metaphor — from metapherein: “(1) to transfer, carry over; (2) to change or alter; (3) to use a word in a strange sense.” meta (“over, across”) + pherein (“to carry, to bear, to bear children”) I read a guide to field games instruction and understood it no better than I understood legalese. Nevertheless, I bought a set of cones. I asked the students to paint them. The kids emblemed three with monsters from a world apparently without rules of perspective. Three more were given remarkably generic sports images, all balls and limbs. Another received a fish-filled ocean decal. Others sported flowers and trees, houses and cars. Yet, whenever I carried the stack of cones out to the field, the paint chipped away and was carried off in the wind, just dust, and they became nothing but plastic again. The monsters went back under the bed and the ocean dried up and the generic athletes trotted to the locker room and I turned around without setting up the game. His artist had come out of retirement, I saw. I could not actually see the artist; like all artists, he was stored backstage and out of view. But he was there. He was there. The teacher I saw each day, sharing a location with me but otherwise sharing nothing anymore, was his double. It was the dramatis personae he had hired to endure living in daylight, waiting for darkness to fall so he could pass the baton to the artist. And here was I, flipping on the light switch whenever the double tried to dim them. He was wrong. Ars brevis, vita longa. Years passed. I teach the afterschool art class alone now. The day after our partnership ended, I heard a great groan from the direction of the kiln, as if the color from the sky had jolted awake. The glacier was calving. The existential sound echoed away, and the sun went out with it. The only sound left in my blinding night came from the moon. |
Samuel Goldsmith is a writer, musician, and photographer who lives in Richmond, California. He writes so as to become a river, not a lake. Since beginning his publication journey in fall 2024, his work has appeared in Gone Lawn, Gyroscope, and others.
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