The Quest of the Artist: A Sci-Fi novella (3 page)

He first started drawing at two, his mother said. She said he was already a prodigal genius then with mnemonic techniques, drawing from memory. By the age of five, he could do pretty good portraits. He always like to hold a crayon in his hand, burnt sienna, was his favorite. The warm-reddish-brown color must have been a kind of connection to an imaginary earth he would never know, his mother said. Even today, when he drew his mother, he used burnt sienna. It’s as if my longing for my mother, is like my longing for the earth, which I will never know, he thought. My blackouts of memory, the sense of her existence during my childhood, have just about disappeared completely.

Schoolboy Tonio Kröger discovers that he deeply admires, indeed loves, his classmate Hans Hansen. The boys are physical and intellectual opposites. Hans is handsome in a Nordic way with steel-blue eyes, straw-colored hair, broad shoulders, and narrow hips, while Tonio has the dark-brown hair, dark eyes, and chiseled features of the south. Hans’s walk is strong and athletic, Tonio’s idle and uneven. It hurts Tonio that Hans responds to his obvious admiration with easygoing indifference. When Hans is late for their after-school walk and finally appears with other friends, Tonio almost cries, but when Hans recalls their agreed-on walk and says that it was good of Tonio to wait for him, everything in Tonio leaps for joy. Schoolboy Tonio Kröger discovers that he deeply admires, indeed loves, his classmate Hans Hansen. The boys are physical and intellectual opposites. Hans is handsome in a Nordic way with steel-blue eyes, straw-colored hair, broad shoulders, and narrow hips, while Tonio has the dark-brown hair, dark eyes, and chiseled features of the south. Hans’s walk is strong and athletic, Tonio’s idle and uneven. It hurts Tonio that Hans responds to his obvious admiration with easygoing indifference. When Hans is late for their after-school walk and finally appears with other friends, Tonio almost cries, but when Hans recalls their agreed-on walk and says that it was good of Tonio to wait for him, everything in Tonio leaps for joy. Schoolboy Tonio Kröger discovers that he deeply admires, indeed loves, his classmate Hans Hansen. The boys are physical and intellectual opposites. Hans is handsome in a Nordic way with steel-blue eyes, straw-colored hair, broad shoulders, and narrow hips, while Tonio has the dark-brown hair, dark eyes, and chiseled features of the south. Hans’s walk is strong and athletic, Tonio’s idle and uneven. It hurts Tonio that Hans responds to his obvious admiration with easygoing indifference. When Hans is late for their after-school walk and finally appears with other friends, Tonio almost cries, but when Hans recalls their agreed-on walk and says that it was good of Tonio to wait for him, everything in Tonio leaps for joy.
Kruger enjoyed sleeping and dreaming, which offered a kind of other-worldly nostalgia. It felt deep and happy. A sense of necessity, feeling nature’s healing powers, his internal sensations, and a fabrication of his imagination. It was self-generating, organic. He often imaged his mother, earth goddess, fetishes, temples; finally, the earth groaning and screaming.

He already felt like an artist—an exile from reality. Alienated, estranged, and though he did not know why, missed his mother, even when she was still there.

Little was known of Kruger’s infancy and childhood. Born on 10 August 21__ in the village of Mill Valley, he was an only child. His Chinese father was a merchant. His mother played electric piano, sang, and sculpted. From his earliest memories, Kruger was unhappy. His fluctuating metabolism, unpredictability, and archetypal memory were a source of concern to him. He felt different from others.

Kruger’s father, named Wing Kong, dignified, a respectable and stoic business merchant, Confucian, disapproved of art, while his mother, born in Mexico supported it. She had artistic talents. Kruger, however, quietly agreed with his father, finding his own tendency to draw meaningless and inappropriate. But he was torn. He already showed signs of his struggle between art and what he perceived as normal life.

Kruger knew that he had become engrossed with drawing and then painting, and was especially attracted to the emotional content in art. It satisfied something deep inside him, but his father’s disapproving voice made him guilty, weak and useless.

Hansen, on the other hand, was more enamored with his toys, and less ambiguous. Kruger felt pure horror at the idea of Hansen “suffering” as an artist like him, thinking that Hansen should remain as he was, clear and strong.

Kruger felt separate from and, at the same time, admired the rest of his community, their sense of purpose, and lack of suffering, which he took to call their normalcy.

Seldom in history has an artist meant very much. What’s the purpose of art? It certainly didn’t change the course of history. In the past, most were satisfied by eating, drinking, sleeping, maybe a little entertainment, a little sex, and if you were lucky, a little satisfaction at work. That was the ideal life. Even during the Neurohacking and Avatar years before the final war, The War of the Annihilation, those things were still true. In fact today, the low-tech life was easier to live, since without tech access, the collective consciousness had easily forgotten how surrogates once lived our lives for us. But now, some would say, isn’t contemporary life pretty close to an animal’s? Animals without curiosity, without questions, concerned with satisfying its immediate appetites. Is that life? Is that good? Is that the ideal Good? Good questions!

But did anybody really need enchantment, or to be “disturbed” even more, or to uselessly dream?

With over ninety-nine percent of any art ever created in the last four thousand years gone, just like everything else—vaporized—just like that—there were no more traditions, let alone a traditional artist, or avant-garde ones, or rebels or creators, destroyers, or shockers. Representational, abstract, a holy fresco that might have taken hundreds of assistants many years to paint in a church, or displaying a urinal, or covering your body in chocolate, digital or performance, it was all the same—gone. If anybody had any artistic impulse now, it was just the basics like graffiti or cave art. So Kruger was special. Kruger’s mother told him a lot about the history of art, and history period, but it just didn’t register, despite his exceptional memory. There were no books, no images, no accessibility through technology. And yet, somehow, Kruger was himself in a class or a tradition, a noble endeavor.

Of course, there’s no ultimate meaning of life for scientists, even social scientists. The expression is nonsensical. And yet, art like many entertainments, can help us pass the time, fascinate us, stimulate us, enchant us, disturb us, affect our dreams, take us away from mere instinct. Perhaps it could even bring us joy and transform our lives.

An artist must have some technique. But not in the technological sense, though computers, instruments, software and machines were previously involved. What we mean here is an artist, like Kruger, must start with his body. He looks, if he’s a painter. Listens, if he’s a musician. He decides he wants to achieve certain results. So, he starts with his emotions, his sight, then transforms them. So, what good is art? What is art good for? In the old sense of the world “utilitarian,” not much, if one says it’s not useful. But where does “useful” begin and end? Isn’t it useful to be distracted by art? Or to play? Dream. Anyway, isn’t most of history about a humanity that just eats and drinks with no other aim in view, with no other possibility of rising any higher, except to increase the “quality” or “quantity” of those activities. But history is not really about them. The most interesting history is about individuals who had visions and did something, like artists but more influential. No one could deny that was the situation before the War of the Annihilation. No matter if you were democratic or authoritarian, capitalist or whatever. This is the mediocre standard of history. It was the rule.

Art could be said to uplift, demand, and transfigure. That’s why it disturbs. There is no morality about it. But there is no morality either. We know that now. Could art elevate us above this realm of no morality? Of course, if you look at a painting by Kruger, you may not feel much of anything. That’s your fault. You’re the animal. We’re not talking about a positive or negative moral effect. We no longer care about good and evil. Perhaps after we reboot, we’ll go back to these fruitless questions, but here we’re saying the artist can transcend good and evil. Things are very horrible now. But Kruger tries to lift us out of ourselves.

One of the reasons for this dystopic situation is people didn’t like an austere life. Many people, especially the young, just wanted to have fun, even while the world was collapsing around them. They weren’t serious. They just wanted entertainment from their things. Then everything collapsed. Now here we are. Now we’ve discovered existence is difficult, but we deal with it by sleeping, hanging out, little action, little noise, no reflection, even less seriousness, only, since now we’re much less linguistically complex, we’re rarely depressed. Some used to contemplate, use critical thought, and even silence. Most now have no inkling of a clarity of thought , let alone acceptance of responsibility. We lack the former passion and enthusiasm and so-called individuality. The formerly primitive and religious is now ironically gone, while we are now more than ever primitive. Detachment is difficult.

Let’s simply say art lifted Kruger out of himself.

When Kruger was sixteen and in love with Inka Holm, he was beside himself. He’d known her all her life but was just becoming aware of her as a sexual being as he watched her dance with another boy, maybe it was Hansen. Everybody wanted to marry Inka and start having babies.

“What an unthinkable monkey!” thought Kruger to himself. But he saw the absorbed smile on bright little Inka's face as she followed the handsome boy’s movement; and that, though not that alone, roused something human in him.

At a dance class, he stared at her. Holm was brown like the earth with green eyes. Holm did not pay Kruger any notice during the class, but Kruger was not without admirers. Another girl named Mary Verme was more like Kruger and admired his art. She was an actress and dreamed of joining a troupe.  But Verm was plain looking and he avoided her. He thought she was a loser.

“Faithfulness,” thought Kruger, when he was sixteen, “Yes, I will be faithful, I will love you, Inka, as long as I live!” He said this in the honesty of his intentions. And yet a still small voice whispered misgivings in his ear: after all, he had forgotten Hands Hansen utterly, even though he saw him every day!

And the hateful, the pitiable fact was that this still, small, rather spiteful voice was right: time passed and the day came when Kruger was no longer so unconditionally ready as he once had been to die for the lively Inka, because he felt in himself desires and powers to accomplish in his own way a host of wonderful things in this world.

But
now
, Kruger, however, would rather love Holm, who teased him for his art. He did not find comfort with his gravitation toward the arts; he was still embarrassed by Mary’s acting. Perhaps he thought drawing was superior to drama. Once again, Kruger was still attracted to that dignified and respectable quality he saw in his father!

While dancing the Electric Slide, Kruger became part of Holm’s group. Her presence made it difficult for him to focus, and he unthinkingly danced the female percussive part. Everybody laughed at him. He left the group with the laughter and scorn of the other “normals,” and contemplated his existence in the corner, torn between art and life once again. He admired people like Inka Holm who had no interest in art and just flirted and wanted to start families again.

As he contemplated, he also waited. Inka must come, he thought. She must notice where he had gone, must feel how he suffered! He was drowning! She must slip out to him, even pity must bring her, to lay her hand on his shoulder and say: “Do come back to us—don't be sad—I love you, Tony.” He listened behind him and waited in frantic suspense. But such things did not happen in this world. Kruger vowed to renounce love, and swim only into art, at that moment.

He heard of his father’s death in Venice Beach. He had been a trader in the south, it turned out, where old traders died along the old Venice boardwalk. The short, practical, dignified, Confucian, formerly carefully dressed gentleman, who believed in doing business, and towing the line was dead.

Kruger always dreaded death, and yet he equated his art with death. Now the one who’d contributed bringing him into the world was dead.

After living with his mother for the past years, and the unwitting recipient of her barrage of wisdom during the formative years, his beautiful, fiery Mexican mother, who played the piano so wonderfully, before the electricity gave out once and for all, and to whom nothing mattered at all, she married another  musician—a virtuoso with a Latin name on the acoustic guitar, and went away with him toward the desert cities. She said they would be troubadours. “Thanks for nothing, bitch,” he said.

Kruger accepted all this, though he was slightly surprised by her lack of love for him, or even a little concern, but who was he to call her to care about him, an artist himself—who did not love others—and could not even give an answer when asked what he meant to do in life.

His house was abandoned, with only him living there. Most of it was collapsed anyway. He used a hammock suspended between two eucalyptus trees and didn’t really care. He tried to live alone for a few months but they forced him to move into the compound’s collective for orphans. He only missed the old granite fountain in the backyard.

Even forced to live in the compound, he felt great isolation. At the same time, he continued his experiments in visual perception. And to continue debate with himself on the contribution of art to society.