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13

Gould had twenty-seven professors. The one he liked best, however, was Mondrian Kilroy. He was a man of about fifty, with an oddly Irish face (he wasn't Irish). On his feet he always wore gray cloth slippers, so they all thought that he lived at the university, and some that he had been born there. He taught statistics.

Once Gould had gone into Classroom 6 and had seen, sitting at one of the desks there, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy. The curious thing was that he was crying. Gould sat down a few desks away, and opened his books. He liked to study in empty classrooms. One didn't usually find professors crying there. Mondrian Kilroy said something, very softly, and Gould was quiet for a bit, then said he hadn't heard him. Mondrian Kilroy, turning towards him, said that he was crying. Gould saw that he didn't have a handkerchief, or anything, and that the back of his hand was wet, and the tears were dripping down inside the collar of a blue shirt. Do you want a tissue? he asked. No, thank you. Would you like me to bring you something to drink? No, thank you. He was still crying, there was no doubt about it.

Although peculiar, it couldn't be considered completely illogical, given the direction that for some years the studies of Prof. Mondrian Kilroy had been taking, that is to say given the nature of his research, which, for some years, had centered on a rather singular subject, that is to say: he studied curved objects. You have no idea how many curved objects exist; only Mondrian Kilroy, and even in his case it was only by approximation, was able to appreciate the impact on man's perceptual network and, therefore, on his ethical-sentimental disposition. In general he found it difficult to recapitulate the argument in front of his colleagues, who were often inclined to consider his research “excessively lateral” (whatever such an expression might mean). But it was his conviction that the presence of curved surfaces in the index of existence was anything but accidental, and in fact represented in some sense the flight path by means of which the real escaped the rigid framework of its destiny, that fatally blocked orthogonal structure. It was what, in general, “set the world in motion again,” to use the exact words of Prof. Mondrian Kilroy.

The sense of all of that emerged clearly—and yet in an undoubtedly bizarre form—in his lectures, and in some in particular, and with unusual brilliance in one, the one known as Lecture No. 11, which was devoted to Claude Monet's
Waterlilies.
As you all know,
Waterlilies
is not properly a painting but, rather, a group of eight great wall panels that, if set next to each other, would give the impressive final result of a composition three hundred feet long and six feet high. Monet worked on the paintings for an unspecified number of years, and decided, in 1918, to give them to his country, France, in homage to its victory in the First World War. He continued to work on them to the end of his life, and he died, on December 5, 1926, before being able to see them exhibited to the public. A curious tour de force, they received contradictory critical judgments, being at times described as prophetic masterpieces and at times as, at best, decorations for dressing up the walls of a brasserie. The public, however, continues even today to regard them with unconditional and rapt admiration.

As Prof. Mondrian Kilroy himself was fond of pointing out, the
Waterlilies
presents an obviously paradoxical feature—disconcerting, he was fond of saying—and that is the despicable choice of subject: for three hundred feet of length and six of height, they immortalize solely a pond of waterlilies. Some trees, fleetingly, a bit of sky, perhaps, but essentially: water and waterlilies. It would be difficult to find a subject more insignificant, in effect kitsch, nor is it easy to grasp how a genius could have conceived of devoting years of work and hundreds of square feet of color to such nonsense. A single afternoon and the outside of a teapot would have been more than sufficient. And yet it is precisely in this absurdity that the genius of the
Waterlilies
begins. It is so evident—Prof. Mondrian Kilroy would say—what Monet intended to do. He intended to paint nothingness.

To paint nothingness must have been such an obsession for him that the last thirty years of his life seem, in hindsight, to have been possessed—utterly consumed—by it. And from the exact day when, in November of 1893, he bought an extensive piece of land adjacent to his property at Giverny, and conceived the idea of constructing a large pool for aquatic flowers—in other words, a pond filled with waterlilies. A project that could, reductively, be interpreted as an old man's taking up of an aesthetic hobby, and which, on the other hand, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy did not hesitate to define as the conscious, strategic first move of a man who knew perfectly well where he was going. In order to paint nothingness, he first had to find it. Monet did something more: he produced it. He surely understood that the solution to the problem was not to obtain nothingness by leaving out the real (ordinary abstract painting can do something like that) but, rather, to obtain nothingness by a process of progressive breakdown and dispersal of the real. He understood that the nothingness he was looking for was the whole, caught in an instant of momentaneous absence. He imagined it as a free zone between what existed and what no longer existed. He was not unaware that this would be a rather lengthy undertaking.

“Excuse me, my prostate is calling”—Prof. Mondrian Kilroy customarily said when he reached this point in Lecture No. 11. He would go to the bathroom and return a few minutes later, visibly relieved.

The record tells us that in those thirty years Monet spent much more time working in his garden than he did painting: ingenuously, the record splits in two an action that in fact was one, and that Monet performed with obsessive determination every moment of his last thirty years:
creating
the
Waterlilies.
Cultivating them and painting them were simply different names for the same adventure. We can imagine that what he had in mind was: waiting. He had had the wit to choose, as a starting point, a corner of the world in which reality was characterized by a high degree of evanescence and monotony, a muteness nearly without meaning. A pond of waterlilies. The problem then was to induce that portion of the world to unload any residual dross of meaning—to bleed it, empty it, dissipate it to the point of near-total disappearance. Its lamentable
existence
would then become little more than the simultaneous presence of various vanished absences. To achieve that ambitious result, Monet relied on a rather banal but well-tested stratagem—a stratagem whose devastating efficacy is attested to by married life. Nothing can become so meaningless as whatever you wake up beside every morning of your life. What Monet did was to bring into his house the portion of the world that he intended to reduce to nothing. He created a lily pond in the very place where it would be impossible for him to avoid seeing it. Only an ass—argued Prof. Mondrian Kilroy in his Lecture No. 11—could believe that to impose on oneself daily intimacy with that pond was a way of knowing it and understanding it and stealing its secret. It was a way of demolishing it. One can say that every time Monet's gaze rested on that pond he came a step closer to absolute indifference, burning up residues of amazement and remnants of wonder. One can even hypothesize that that ceaseless work on the garden—attested to by the record—touching up here and there, planting flowers and pulling them up, laying out and relaying out borders and paths, was nothing other than a painstaking surgical operation on everything that refused to be worn down by habit, that persisted in rippling the surface of attention, disrupting the picture of absolute meaninglessness that was taking shape in the painter's eye. Monet was looking for the rotundity of nothingness, and where habit showed itself to be impotent he didn't hesitate to intervene with the scalpel.

Vran,
Prof. Mondrian Kilroy noted, with onomatopoetic effect, accompanying the expression with an unmistakable gesture.

Vran.

One day he woke up, got out of bed, and went into the garden; he reached the edge of the pond, and what he saw was: nothing. Another man would have been content. But one of the components of genius is a boundless obstinacy which causes it to pursue its goals with an overdeveloped anxiety for perfection. Monet began to paint: but shut up in his studio. Not for a moment did he think of setting up his easel at the edge of the pond, facing the waterlilies. It was immediately clear to him that, having labored for years to create those waterlilies, he had to remain shut up in his studio to paint them, that is, confined in a place where, in order to stick to the facts, he was unable to see the waterlilies. Sticking to the facts: there, in his studio, he could
remember
them. And this choice of memory—rather than the direct approach of sight—was an extreme, brilliant modification of nothingness, since memory—as opposed to sight—assured an infinitesimal perceptual counter-movement that kept the waterlilies a step away from being too meaningless, warming them with a glimmer of recollection, just enough to stop them an instant before the abyss of non-existence. They were nothing, but they
were
.

Finally he could paint them.

Here, customarily, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy paused somewhat theatrically, returned to his desk and sat down, and allowed his audience a few minutes of silence that were filled in various ways, though for the most part politely. This was the moment when, generally, his colleagues left the room, displaying a web of facial micro-expressions that were meant to signify lively approval, along with sincere regret for the myriad tasks that, as one could understand, prevented them from staying longer. Prof. Mondrian Kilroy never gave any sign of noticing them.

Not that to Monet it was important, exactly, to paint nothingness. His idea was not a sort of weary-artist affectation, or even an empty ambition to create a virtuosic tour de force. What he had in mind was something more subtle. Prof. Mondrian Kilroy stopped for a second at this point, stared at the audience, and, lowering his voice, as if he were about to let out a secret, said: Monet needed nothingness so that his painting could be free to portray, in the absence of a subject, itself. Contrary to what a naive observer might suggest, the
Waterlilies
represents not waterlilies but the gaze that gazes at them. It is the mold of a determinate perceptual system. To be precise: of a wildly anomalous perceptual system. Other colleagues, surely more authoritative than I—Prof. Mondrian Kilroy noted with nauseating false modesty—have already pointed out that
Waterlilies
has no coordinates, that is, the waterlilies appear to be floating in a space without hierarchies, in which closeness and distance do not exist, nor up and down, nor before and after. Technically speaking,
Waterlilies
represents the gaze of an impossible eye. The point of view that looks at the waterlilies is not at the edge of the pond, not in the air, not on the surface of the water, not at a distance, not close up. It is everywhere. Perhaps an astigmatic god would be able to see this way— Prof. Mondrian Kilroy was fond of commenting, ironically. He said: The
Waterlilies
is nothingness, seen by the eye of no one.

Therefore to view the
Waterlilies
means to gaze at a gaze—he said—and furthermore a gaze that does not refer to some former experience of ours but is unique and unrepeatable, a view that could never be our own. To put it another way: to look at the
Waterlilies
is an outer limit of experience, a nearly impossible undertaking. This did not escape Monet, who for a long time was occupied, and preoccupied, in searching, with maniacal fastidiousness, for a particular arrangement of the
Waterlilies
that would reduce as much as possible its non-visibility. What he managed to find was an elementary device, in itself simple, which even today demonstrates a solid effectiveness and which, as an irrelevant corollary, was the means by which those waterlilies slipped into the radius of Prof. Mondrian Kilroy's research. Monet wanted the
Waterlilies
to be arranged, according to a precise sequence, on eight curved walls.

Curves, ladies and gentlemen—announced Prof. Mondrian Kilroy, with transparent satisfaction.

For a scholar who had devoted extensive essays to rainbows, hard-boiled eggs, the houses of Gaudì, cannonballs, highway interchanges and river bends—for a scholar who had consecrated to surface curves years of reflection and analysis—for Prof. Mondrian Kilroy, in short, it must have been a poignant epiphany to discover how that painter of old, impelled to balance on the edge of the impossible, had found salvation in the company of mercifully curved walls—walls that had escaped the condemnation of any corner. Thus it was with a thrill of satisfaction that Prof. Mondrian Kilroy felt he had the right to project slide No. 421, which was a view of the two rooms of the Orangerie, in Paris, where Monet's
Waterlilies
was installed in January of 1927, and where the public would still, today, be able to see it, if only
seeing it
were not a term utterly inadequate to the impossible action of looking at it.

(Slide No. 421)

There is not a single inch of the
Waterlilies
that is not a curved surface, ladies and gentlemen. And with this Prof. Mondrian Kilroy came to the true heart of Lecture No. 11, of all his lectures the most brilliantly lucid. He moved closer to his audience, and from here to the end it unrolled with a floodlike, yet methodical, passion.

I have seen the men and women there, with the
Waterlilies
upon them. They come through the door and immediately feel lost, as if HURLED from the habitual act of seeing, EJECTED from their dwelling place in a specific point of view and diffuuuused in a space where they search in vain for the beginning. A beginning. In a certain sense the
Waterlilies,
although immovable, revolves around them, set in motion by the curvature that arrays the panels like shells around the empty spaces of the rooms in such a way that they seem to be the walls, fatally suggesting a sort of panorama to which the visitors yield, attempting to turn in a circle as their eyes orbit 360 degrees, in childish wonderment: not infrequently tinged by a smile. Perhaps for a moment they have the illusion that they have
seen
, adjusting to a mode of perception related to that of the cinema, but as they try, mechanically, to find the right distance and the proper sequence the disappointment is immediate, for it is precisely distance and sequence which the cinema dictates at every step, and so they have become unused to looking freely, have unlearned how to choose, cinema being a continuously forced looking—so to speak vicarious, despotic, tyrannical: whereas these waterlilies seem to suggest the vertigo of a liberated perception—an impossible task, as everyone knows. And so men—they feel lost. At this point they allow some time. They wander, they take another turn around, they stroll, stand still again, line up, back up, sometimes they sit down—on the floor or on convenient, compassionate benches—conscious of seeing something they love, yet anything but certain of seeing it, truly seeing it. Many begin to wonder how. How long it must have taken, how high it is, how many pounds of paint he used, how many feet long it is, how. They're escaping, obviously; they like to think that knowing what you have before you makes it possible, finally, to have it, in effect, before you, and not above, under, on, beside; that is, where the
Waterlilies
resides, heedless of any quantification —simply everywhere. Sooner or later, they dare, and they move in. They are going to see. But only from close up. They would touch if they could—their eyes rest there, since their fingers can't. And ultimately they stop seeing, unable to grasp anything, perceiving only thick anarchic brushstrokes, like the bottoms of dirty plates, blue mustard and mayonnaise, or chromatic commas on the walls of impressionist toilets. They laugh. And immediately they go back to regain the point at which they knew at least what they were
not
seeing: some waterlilies. As they step back they do not fail to wonder how that man could see from a distance and paint close up, a subtle trick that charms them, leaving them, at the end of their little journey backwards to the center of the room, as hopeless as before, and also bewitched: and at this exact moment the consciousness of not knowing how to see acquires a painful streak, coupled, as it now is, with the subterranean certainty that what escaped their gaze would have been a piercing pleasure, an unforgettable memory of beauty. Then they give up. And place their hand on the supreme surrogate of experience, on the seal of every failure to see. They liberate from the warmth of a gray felt case their undoing: the camera.