Shadow and Light

Abstraction finally comes to him. Not from his efforts with pencil marks or planes of colour on paper or canvas, but inside his head. Blocks of time and space, once ordered and linear, now converge, elide, overlap inside his steadily dulling understanding of the world. Gradually the world loses all sense, all meaning. The others who share that time and space with him become - fleetingly, inconsistently, it seems to him - a wife, children, friends, then by turns strangers all. Here is a man in a dark suit carrying a leather bag. A Gladstone, he thinks they call it. The man says ‘Hello’ as though he knows him, familiar. Asks how he is feeling today. Has he seen him before? A friend or relation? A Doctor? He cannot recall.

The change seeps in slowly. The dissolution. Parts of days simply disappear. Memories cannot be recovered. Words can no longer be found. The person he is talking to becomes a stranger mid-sentence, their face still familiar, as though he has known them forever yet no longer recognizes who they are. Names of things and people elude him. The world becomes a nameless, alien place.

Worse, he slowly loses understanding of who he is himself. At times, he even wonders if he is anyone at all. The self he knew, the memories he held, the facts, the joys, the fears, all slipping from him.

Does he even have a name?

One day (Or is it an hour, a year? Is there a difference?), he finds himself in what he takes to be an artist’s studio. It is in an attic, in what must be a substantial house given the size of the room. Exposed wooden roof beams, white boarded walls, a long wooden work surface along one side, its surface spattered with a rainbow of dried pigments, cluttered with boxes of pastels and pencils, sketchbooks, bottles of ink, glass jars full of brushes. He has no idea where he is, who this house and this studio belong to. Someone must have brought him here. He was somewhere else, and now he is here, the physical translocation unregistered. This is how it goes. Like a motion picture film, randomly edited. Changing scenes, backdrops, characters. Times of day or night. Dialogue that jumps from subject to subject, incongruous leaps of context and meaning. He has no script. He is no longer director of these things.

There is a woman here too. A woman he does not recognise. The artist perhaps, or the owner or caretaker of the house? She stands to one side watching him as he moves around inspecting the paintings stacked in groups against the sides of the room.

“Some of these are not bad,” he says to her. She seems friendly enough, so why not talk to her. “Did you make them?” he asks.

“No, you did, George. You painted them.” He picks up a painting, a landscape - a church, fields, trees, a solitary figure walking, a clouded sky. Competent but dull, he thinks. Unoriginal. No creative spark. In the bottom right-hand corner, a signature - G. Napier. A thin scrawl of black paint, almost illegible. The name means nothing to him.

The woman comes over to him, places her hand on his arm. Who is she, this woman who seems to know him better than he knows himself? A small flame of recollection flickers. Can she be his wife? He finds her beautiful, and she reminds him of a woman he once knew. Minutes, or hours, or years ago.

“Have we done this before?” he asks, the echo of some unformed association registering. She nods, her eyes glistening.

“And these are mine? All of them?”

“Yes, you were… You are…,” she corrects herself, “a successful artist. These are part of your legacy.”

A change comes over him, the frustration, verging towards anger that overwhelms him unbidden from time to time manifesting itself in his tone.

“No! You should destroy them. They’re too romantic. Too saccharine. Far too dull.”

Then, in the space of a second, he no longer remembers why he has said this, what his words relate to. Instead, he is thinking of a man, in a room, also a studio, large, high ceilinged, one wall a towering plane of glass. The man is talking to him, looking over his shoulder at a drawing he is making. He cannot make out what the man is saying, but his tone is harsh. He has an air of authority, and he does not like what he sees. Others in the room start to laugh, to shake their heads in disapproval. In disbelief. Did this happen? Or was it a dream? He thinks the man had a strange name, a name he cannot summon.

“Would you like to stay here for a while?” the woman asks, drawing him back to this studio, herself a stranger to him still.

He looks around, shakes his head. There is nothing here that he recognises. Nothing of himself.

“Who painted these?” he asks.

His days are punctuated by moments of clarity. Between those moments, nothing. In one instant he is present, lucid, able to respond to what is said to him, to recognise those he is with. Then the shadows fall, interspersed with flashes of things that he cannot figure out how they relate to him, followed, who knows how much later, by another moment of clarity.

He stops in front of a painting hanging above the mantle. A portrait. A young man. Handsome. The young man is trying to smile though there is a sense of hesitancy in his eyes. As though he is reluctant to engage with the gaze of the artist. As though he wants to run away.

“Who is this?” he asks the woman who seems often to be with him.

“It’s Joseph, our son,” she replies. “You painted it for his eighteenth birthday.” So, he has a son - a revelation. The woman said ‘our’. She must be his wife. Another revelation. Should he believe what she says?

“The eyes are not right,” he says. It is not clear to him why he says this, whether as criticism of his own painterly skills, if the picture really is by him, or from a memory of the young man’s - his son’s? - character, here inaccurately captured and portrayed.

The word Salient comes to him. Unbidden. Explosions all around. Bright streamers of light drift down against a screen of blackened sky, illuminating a shattered landscape. Broken trees. Broken bodies. Broken dreams and expectations. An explosion nearby rocks him, throws him from his feet. Something in his body breaks. Pain. A rotting hand, more bone than flesh, emerges as though to greet him from the wall of yellow mud beside him. A sketchbook. The name Nash. An exhibition. A pastel drawing of a helmet floating, upturned in a muddy pool at the bottom of a crater. Then a memory of being carried, the metal of a helmet cool against his cheek. Then a large room, little more than a corrugated shed. Black-out blankets draped over windows. Green and white enamelled lamp shades suspended from the ceiling. There are beds, dozens of them. A hospital. Men injured, dying, calling out. Prayers, poems, gibberish. Mother! Father! A man he knows in a far bed teetering on the verge of death. The man who carried him to safety. The smell of blood, carbolic and shit. And laughter, harsh and incongruous.

His leg is raised in traction. A woman is beside him. She leans over him, her face close to his. She wipes his brow with a damp, cooling cloth. He finds her beautiful.

He is in bed, naked. Nervous. A wedding night?

The woman lies beneath him. Naked too.

She is smiling, her body open to him.

He lowers his face to kiss her.

To kiss her sex. Another wound.

He freezes, his body shaking, racked by fear. By revulsion.

This last, sadly he remembers. This last he still owns.

Then he is present in a room, suburban, almost familiar, birds singing outside in the garden. He is standing in front of a portrait. A portrait of a young man he does not recognise. In the eyes of the portrait there is something of wanting to run away. He himself is shaking. He does not know why. A woman comes to him, wraps her arm around him, her head resting against his shoulder.

From out of nowhere a word comes to him - Chiaroscuro. Effects of shadow and light. With each passing day the light inside him fades, the shadows become more filled in. He is trapped in this world like in a Piranesi prison, rooms upon rooms unwinding within and beyond each other, darkening, vertiginous, no escape. The word Carceri comes to him. Incarceration.

In one of his increasingly rare moments of clarity a realisation comes to him. In the end there will be only shadow, no light.

A younger man comes to visit him. He does not recognise him. The man says he is his son, Joseph, though he says he prefers the more familiar Joe. He has no choice but to believe him. Why would anyone lie about such a thing? He asks the young man if he is well, then after a long pause in which neither speaks, he asks if he has good employment - a requisite if he has come to request the hand of his daughter in marriage. As he asks this, he is uncertain whether he has a daughter. The younger man laughs; he is clearly embarrassed. He says he cannot marry his sister, it is illegal, and anyway, he is already married, to a woman named Esther. They have two children. He leaves the room, returns with a woman, another stranger, though the word ‘wife’ echoes in his thoughts. He is confused. This woman is not his wife. He asks the young man - was Joseph his name? Biblical. An innocent victim of betrayal - if he thinks this is a joke. Of late, this house is often full of impostors, people claiming to be who they are not.

Another word comes to him, rising out of the shadows. Grisaille. An impression of depth, of substance. A semblance of form depicted in two-dimensions, a simulacrum. There is no depth to his perception of himself, just fleeting glimpses of a past. Lived by whom?

A younger man is talking to him. He looks like the youth in the portrait that is hanging above the mantle, though older, the flesh more tightly drawn. They must be one and the same; they have the same features, and there is a light of evasion in the eyes of both portrait and man. Whose house is he in?

“I’m so sorry. I love you, Pa,” the younger man says. “I wish it could have been different between us. You were never there.”

As he says this his head is turned down, his eyes locked on his hands cradled in his lap. He does not dare look at his father. A grown man now, he still feels like running away. From this man who has always been a stranger, inaccessible when needed, too often locked away in his attic, battling his memories of a war fought long ago, being fought inside him still. A war without substance. A war that can never be won. What had he hoped to attain there, sequestered in his studio? Escape? Spending days moulding his terrors into the more pliable substance of paint, hoping thereby to make them tangible; or inter them in the past? Or, more foolishly, enacting a ritual - a sacrifice? - performed in a vain effort to resurrect the unfortunate dead? But in him the past has remained ever present, persistent. Even now, when he has become also a stranger to himself, his present an ever-dulling void, still he is fighting.

Surely, the true escape would have been with his children, the younger man thinks. Out here with the living. He does not say this. He knows his words no longer register with this man sitting with him in this quiet room. A man who was once his father. Neither paint nor words can change it. There is nothing more he can say.

From another room, on a radio, distant voices come to him. A discussion about Cuba, Russian missiles, Khrushchev. The potentiality of another war. A war few if any would survive. And so it goes on, the young man thinks, and wishes he could talk about this with his father - the human readiness to sacrifice all for an ideology, a principle - as he reaches across to touch his father’s hand.

Mieke Napier sits in the garden, amidst the dappled shadows cast by the spreading branches of an acer tree. Her husband and her son are inside the house, in a room with French doors opening to the garden. The doors are cracked open, admitting an Indian summer’s warmth and light, but she hears nothing. She knows that nothing can pass between them now. Voices from a radio filter down from an upstairs room. Male voices, indistinct, but she knows the matter they are discussing. It is the thing everybody is talking about. She does not want to know.

Her husband had planted the acer two years after the war that had brought them together, in the garden of their new family home, forty-three years ago. Every year since then, on the twenty-fourth day of September - the anniversary of the day he was injured, the day he escaped from one hell and into another, unforeseen and more gradual, yet equally debilitating - he has sat in the garden, come rain or shine, under a hastily erected awning if needed, and has recorded an image of the tree in watercolour on paper.

Trying to capture its burgeoning autumn colours, its transition from vibrant life to dormancy. Or so his rationalisation has always been.

The style of the paintings has changed little over the years, only the size and form of the tree, the colouring of its leaves on that one day in response to the particular timing of the seasons, sometimes tardy, at others more advanced. Always they have shown only a realistic representation of what he has seen. The colours, the play of shadow and light, the proportions of the tree. Only slightly over the years have they elided to something more impressionistic. More ambiguous. Each year, she has looked at the new painting he has created, hoping she can discern among the foliage the ghosts he has been trying to exorcise. She has found nothing.

This year, there has been no painting. There will be no painting ever again.

She would like to frame and hang the pictures. To create a formal record of her husband’s futile searching. But there are too many; there are not enough walls. Forty-two images. Of a tree. His tree. His memorial to his own survival while others perished.

Sometimes she thinks it is a blessing, her husband’s gradual undoing, his dissolution to nothing.

She hopes it will finally free her son.