Medusa Frequency (11 page)

A little after nine o’clock I arrived at the Johan de Witthuis, which did not open until ten o’clock. By that time I was longing for the conveniences as well as for the Vermeer girl. There were no signs anywhere that said anything like HERREN, no bifurcated pictographs. Until ten o’clock I walked up and down looking at shop windows and wondering whether a preoccupation with dikes had made the Dutch constipated.

When the doors opened I paid my admission and bought an illustrated catalogue on the cover of which was Vermeer’s
View of Delft.
I said to the man at the desk, ‘Are all the paintings from the Mauritshuis here?’

‘No, only the ones in the catalogue.’

‘But the Vermeer, the
Head of a Young Girl,
that’s here, isn’t it?’

‘No, the only Vermeer is this one.’ He indicated the reproduction on the cover of the catalogue.

‘Where’s the
Head of a Young Girl?’

‘It’s on loan in America.’

‘Thank you.’ Pondering the complexity of this demonstration I went inside and made my way to the
toiletten
in the basement.

When I came back up the stairs I went into Zaal A where I found myself looking at two panels attached to each other, Nos 843a and 843b, a diptych, evidently, by G. David (1460-1523). Two narrow vertical panels offering a dark wood, many leaves, a stream, a donkey, a bird, two oxen, a road, a stone building with a tower or a silo. A mill? Unlikely. The word hospice came into my mind. Did the stream flow under an arch and into the building? Or did the road glitter, did the road flicker and shine
not like a road? The dancing beast of the mystery, was it in this mystic wood? What a dark whispering in those many leaves! Come and find me, she had said. In this dark and whispering wood?

It occurred to me then that this Witthuis, this new abode, was a place that the Vermeer girl had physically departed from. She’d gone away over the water. Out of her Witts? Away from wittingness, perhaps; beyond the reach of intellect. Her old dwelling-place had been the Mauritshuis. I had no Dutch dictionary but I had my pocket German Langenscheidt with me so I looked to see if there was anything close to Maurits in German.
Maurer
was bricklayer, mason. The number of the railway carriage in which I had travelled here from the Hook of Holland had been 727. G is the seventh letter of the alphabet, B the second. GBG: GIRL BECOMES GONE. The Vermeer girl had moved from the house of bricks, of gross earthy matter, to the house of wits, of the mind, but intellect proving barren she had become gone while Hermes for a joke sent me to find her. No, it wasn’t just Hermes - she herself had told me to come and find her and in some way not yet revealed to me this was the place where she would be found, I could feel it.

I looked in my catalogue to see what it had to say about this dark wood painted by G. David. There was no mention of it whatever. I went to the man at the desk. ‘Those two panels by David,’ I said, ‘843a and 843b, they’re not in the catalogue.’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘they’re not. They’re in the catalogue that’s in the shop.’

‘Where’s the shop?’

‘Through there.’

I went to the shop and bought the
Mauritshuis Illustrated General Catalogue
and a postcard of the Vermeer girl. Two French schoolgirls were buying the same postcard. ‘But where is this painting?’ one of them asked the man at the counter. ‘We can’t find it.’

‘It’s in America.’

‘When does it return?’

‘Next year.’

Turning in the catalogue to David, No. 843, I read:

David, Gerard
Born ca 1460 in Oudewater, died 1523 in Bruges. Worked in Bruges, where he was the most important artist after the death of Memling.
Two forest scenes
P. each 90 × 30·5. The versos of the wings of a triptych; the left one with a donkey, the right one with two oxen. Ox and donkey recur in the middle panel. The latter, depicting the Adoration of the child and the rectos of the wings are in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

I went back to Zaal A and stared at the two panels. A space suggested itself between them and I waited to see what would appear in the space.

Someone was looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw a tall thin man with a large light-bulb-shaped bald head and those drooping oldtime-gunfighter moustaches much favoured by American television actors. From the hang of his face however I guessed him to be European, possibly Scandinavian. He seemed to be drawing himself up into his head preparatory to speaking, and as I was the only other person in the room I waited to hear what he would say.

‘Rectos no,’ he said. ‘Mmnvs? Everything is metaphor and metaphor is the only actuality. Here we have the versos of the wings of a triptych, here we have only the other sides of the missing rectos that when folded shut covered the Adoration of the child. Mmnvs. Nnvsnu rrndu.’

‘Did I understand you to say nnvsnu rrndu?’ I said.

‘Mmnvs.’

‘You’re thinking of existing?’

His head seemed to grow larger and balder and more light-bulb-shaped. ‘You observe me, sir,’ he said. ‘You observe me consistently and three-dimensionally manifesting, with aplomb, myself both as picture and sound. Do you not?’

‘I do.’

‘I revert to the tremendour of this metaphor, the other-sideness of versos without rectos and the child gone missing, out of our sight, offering only its rejection of our potential adoration.’

‘“Tremendour.” I haven’t heard that before.’

‘Tsrungh. From its otherness of place it speaks the encrustation, the palimpsest, the ultimate dialectic of what Redon called “the deep health of the black”. This is where I get my jollies; I am a creature of the deeps.’

‘Says who?’

‘Says
Sight and Sound
for one. They did an eight-page piece about my work: “The Unslumbering Kraken”.’

‘I’ve stopped reading
Sight and Sound,
I don’t think film people should be allowed near words, it’s bad for everybody.’

‘I agree completely. I speak only in pictures. With me the image is everything, carrying within it as it does the protoimage, the after-image, and the anti-image. This is why here I have come to speak to the Vermeer girl and to hear what she will say to me but alas, she is gone over the water and here I stand looking at this enchanted wood with its missing rectos and its centre that could not be held. This utters to me most powerfully.’

‘What did you want with the Vermeer girl?’

‘I’m in love with her. She is that aspect of the Mother Goddess that dominates my being, my perception, my innermost and uttermost blackness, my seminal vesicles. She is the proto-image of the femaleness of things; always have I spoken to her in the whispering of the night, in that warm and creatureful darkness where the flickering of the here-and-gone shows its little uncertain flame.’

‘Have you no shame? How can you say such things in a public place to someone you’ve never seen before? You don’t even know my name.’

‘That signifies not at all; you know
my
name.’

‘No I don’t.’

‘I’ve told you it: Kraken, Gösta Kraken as you know very well. Not for one moment do I believe that you’ve stopped reading
Sight and Sound.
From the faltering cadence of your stare I perceive that you recognize me from those many photographs of me in that publication and elsewhere. Fnss. The self-consuming antistrophe of your silence tells me that you resent my head of Orpheus swimming up the Thames.’

‘Faltering cadence of my stare! I’m not taking that from you, nor “self-consuming antistrophe” either. Don’t you come the
deconstructionist with me, you ponce. I’ve never even seen your swimming head of Orpheus.’

‘Very well then, tell me your name. I can see that you will be fractally asymptotic in your resonances until we have spoken this out.’

‘My name is Herman Orff and you’ve never heard of me.’

‘Oh, but I have. Luise has mentioned you several times.’

There was an upholstered bench behind me. I sat down on it.’

‘Luise’, I said, ‘has mentioned.’

‘You. More than several times, reverberantly and with plangency.’

‘What is Luise to you?’

‘Lost. Gone. Two years only, then Znrvv! No more Luise. A note on the kitchen table like an unaccompanied cello in a studio with dusty windows.’

‘Don’t roll the credits over it; just tell me plangently when she left you.’

‘Seven years ago, with my sound man.’

‘What do you suppose she heard in him?’

‘Other music.’

‘And what did she ever see in you?’

‘Flickering images.’

‘Of what?’

‘It doesn’t matter, it’s the flickering that gives the excitement. Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion with the revolving of the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four pictures per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, rrks?’

‘Luise saw all that in you, did she?’

‘It isn’t only that I make films, I am in myself a big flickerer and women respond to this. I’m so much there/not there/there/not
there. Very exciting. It stimulates a woman’s natural holding-on reflex.’

‘And yet Luise seems to have let go of you.’

‘Nothing is for ever.’

‘Fallok composes electronic music; I write novels; you direct films; the one after you (whom she probably left five years ago) was a sound engineer. Before Fallok she was with a man who ran a restaurant.’

‘By now it’s a computer programmer or a doctor; into the arts she came and out of the arts she has gone, vnnvvzzz. What did we do wrong?’

‘You don’t know? You don’t know what you did wrong?’

‘My behaviour was impeccable. When she was with me she moved among top-class people - film stars, composers, painters, writers; we went to all the best restaurants, we had friends with yachts and villas on the Côte d’Azur and in the Greek islands: the whole thing was conducted in the style one would expect of me.’

‘Were you faithful to her?’

‘Faithful!’ His large face leapt back as if I had hit him with a pizza. ‘Faithful! I can only be faithful to the flickering; more than that I don’t accept the moral authority of.’

‘Two years with you. I can’t understand it. I’m rotten but you’re a real creep.’

‘Were you faithful to her?’

‘No.’

‘Then why do you look at me as if you’ve just come down from the mountain with stone tablets in your hands?’

‘Because I know I’m rotten and you don’t know that you are.’

‘You make a virtue of necessity; being a self-confessed rotten you are aware of your rottenness. Being unrotten I have not such an awareness.’

‘Why don’t you flicker off and manifest your sound and picture somewhere else.’

‘You’re a very troubled person, znnzz?’

‘I can live with it.’

‘Are you certain of that?’

‘Don’t let me keep you; you must have many urgent demands on your time.’

‘I assure you that only a charitable impulse has kept me in your company this long; ordinarily I don’t like to get too close to obscurity, it’s like quicksand.’

‘You’d better back off then before you get swallowed up.’

‘Are you working on a novel now?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Good luck with it, I hope you resolve your difficulties.’

‘What makes you think I’m having difficulties?’

‘You seem to be falling into the spaces between the successive appearances of yourself. If you’re not careful you’ll disappear.’

‘If I stop thinking you it might well be you that disappears.’

‘I’m disappearing now,’ he said, ‘but you will continue to think of me,’ and he withdrew.

Thinking of him I went upstairs and stood in front of a painting by Frans Post (1612-80), Catalogue No. 915,
Gezicht op het Eiland Tamaraca.
It was a strange painting, a little on the naif side - as apparently artless in its composition as a snapshot, as if the painter had sat himself down on the beach, aimed himself at the island across the water, and painted whatever came between him and it: two black men; two white men; two horses; an expanse of pinky dawn-looking water; two small boats moored by the island; in the foliage of the island was a naked place that looked bitten out by a giant. One of the black men balanced a basket on his head with one hand. He wore nothing but a pair of short white trousers. The other black man, also in white shorts, had put down his basket of yellow fruit and stood holding the reins of a white horse. One of the burdensomely clothed white men stood on the beach waving at or pointing towards the island while the other sat his chestnut horse which had a white blaze on its face and a white sock on the offside hind leg. He did not look at the island.

Perhaps the actual time in the painting was not dawn. But here in the Johan de Witthuis the water across which the Island Tamaraca was seen was dawn water. I could feel in this dawn a presence looking out at me, I could feel in it the buzzing and the swarming of what was gathering itself. I could feel myself approaching the correct frequency, I held myself carefully tuned to it when it came.

Out of the pinky dawn water, naked and shining in the
dawn, rose Luise, quivering like a mirage between the beach and the island seen across the water. Quivering, shimmering, her body becoming, becoming, becoming a face loosely grinning, with hissing snakes writhing round it in the shining dawn. Around me ceased the sounds of the day; the stone of me cracked and I came out of myself quite clean, like a snake out of an egg, nothing obscuring my sight or my hearing. The Gorgon’s head, the face of Medusa, shimmered luminous in a silence that crackled with its brilliance. Her mouth was moving.

What? I said. What are you saying?