On Art

[Rhapsody]

I was very taken with the novel "My Name is Asher Lev" in my sophomore year. When we were assigned projects to write an additional chapter to the book, I really put some effort into it. Immersed in this work are my own opinions of art, expressed in an imitation of Chaim Potok's bleak style. First person Asher's POV.

 

For those who have not read the book, a brief summary. Asher Lev is a Hasidic Jew born and raised in New York City. His artistic talent is discovered early on in life and nurtured by a painter named Jacob Kahn. But his passion for art forces him to confront issues with his culture, religion, and family. The climax comes when Asher creates a painting depicting his own mother crucufied, called the Brooklyn Crucifixion. In the end, he is forced to choose between his family and his art.

 

FIFTEEN

 

My flight was delayed. During the night, a late winter storm overtook the sleeping city. All planes were grounded. I called Jacob Kahn from La Guardia airport and asked to stay at his place. An hour later, Anna Schaeffer came in a cab to pick me up. She chuckled in the car on the way to Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway.

 

“A blizzard in February. How inconvenient.”

“Very.”

“Do your parents know you are staying with us tonight?”

“No.”

She did not say anything, but shot me a worried glance.

 

At the studio, I did not see Jacob Kahn. Anna said he was still recovering from his illness, bedridden. I said nothing and went to my room.

 

My sleep was troubled that night. As the darkness engulfed me, a familiar figure invaded my dreams. He stood, my mythic ancestor, frail and shivering, leaning feebly on a spindly cane. His strong face was now lined with age. His beard was long and white and his eyes were mad slits sunk deep into their sockets. He beckoned to me with his wasted hands and spoke. As always, I could not hear him, but could guess his words. Your pain is on the wind. Come, journey with me, Asher. With the last vestige of his former power, he summoned me. His dark eyes, dull with madness, now shone with woe. I followed him into the trees.

 

I woke in a cold sweat and hurried to the bathroom. When I emerged from the light of the bathroom, I feared crawling into bed again and letting the darkness and stifling closeness take me. Lying silently between the sheets, I listened to the silence, not wanting to go back to sleep. Finally, in the hushed moments before dawn, I crept out of bed and stood at the window, staring out at the snow and silhouettes of bare trees and barren street. I saw the pristine snow illuminated by dimming stars, but they were few and the still shadows were many. They stretched into the sky, bereft of the moon, hushed and leaden.

 

Asher, snow is an enemy in Siberia.

 

I pulled a clean canvas, palette, and brushes from my packed luggage. Standing by the window, I swept the canvas with titanium white, the bleakest hue in the color spectrum. I rubbed it with a frosty gloss, mimicking reflected starlight. I sketched in charcoal the looming buildings, their cold glass and steel and sharp angles, shrouded in darkness. I drew the desolate branches of naked trees, clinging grimly in the teeth of the cold wind. I drew slender vertical lines, slight lampposts with faint pools of light at their feet. I drew the still shadows leaking like ink into the sky. I drew the frozen street, its curbs iced over, slowly dripping. The drops flowed and the wind shrieked and the shadows trickled and suddenly I was slashing and hacking. The paintbrush and palette knife tore at the canvas, at that street, and I painted swiftly, feverishly. I worked in cobalt blues, carbon blacks, smoky pearls, and dark indigos, tainted colors that seeped from plagued Siberia. I do not remember how long I painted there in the cold of the sheltered room, only that when my hands stopped the rosy streaks of dawn washed over them. The weak sunlight scalded and I stared up at my creation.

 

The straight contours of the black street had melted into a rushing river. It churned with white foam and glistened with the glint of shattered glass. A chill went through me, gazing into those frigid depths. It lacked something; the cold was incomplete. I raised my brush as if to attack the painting, not knowing what it needed. With a soft click, the door opened behind me and I whirled.

 

Tanya Kahn poked her face into the room. Her eyes widened when she saw me. She stepped fully inside. Her short white hair caught the only light in the room, where daylight had not yet reached. She stared at me for a long moment. I must have looked mad, a thin boy gripping his brush like a spear and spattered with paint. With the sun rising behind me, my unkempt hair was highlighted, flaming like the visage of a demon. I said nothing. At last she spoke.

 

“Your plane will leave in three hours. It is safe to travel. Jacob wants to see you before you leave. He is an impossible old man. He snores during the day and cannot sleep at night. Yet he wants to see his student at dawn.”

 

She shook her head, the faintest trace of a smile on her face. I heard a strained fondness in her soft voice. My own heart leapt in concern.

 

“I will see him. Will you take me to him?”

 

She nodded. I walked to my baggage to put up my tools. When I looked up, her eyes were fixed behind me, on the painting. Suddenly I felt cold and exposed, stripped. Her gaze turned to me and her eyes contained wonder and something else I could not name. Under her intense gaze, I flushed, feeling the blood rush to my face.

 

“You have a gift, Asher.”

 

Her voice rang in the fading darkness between us, unencumbered by her heavy Russian accent. Involuntarily, I shuddered. I turned to my painting, trying not to look at it; I placed it against the wall, facedown. Then I turned to Tanya, ready to visit Jacob Kahn. Her eyes swept over my face with sincere curiosity. She smiled gently.

 

“You are a strange Jew, Asher Lev. Come, Jacob is eager to see his strange little prodigy.” I followed her out of the room into the morning light, closing the door behind me.

 

*************************

 

Jacob Kahn lay prone under thick quilts, his eyes shut tightly. His breath rasped raggedly in his throat. His pasty skin was beaded with sweat. For a moment I saw my teacher lying, eyes closed peacefully, in another bed, a bed of encasing stone that was slowly lowered into the open jaws of the earth. Then the lid closed over him and I saw Jacob Kahn as he lay now, shivering as his breath whistled out beneath his walrus mustache.

 

I stepped up to the edge of the bed, hearing Tanya retreat out the door behind me. Jacob Kahn opened his eyes. I smiled helplessly and caught the briefest spectre of a smile in return.

 

“Asher Lev. My little Jew,” he said tiredly.

I winced. He saw it. The artist’s eyes had not yet lost their keenness.

“You are exiled.”

“Yes.”

“By the Rebbe?”

“Yes, and by my father.” I paused as he studied my face.

“It was the Crucifixions.”

“Yes. He said there are limits.”

My teacher gazed up at me thoughtfully.

“He is wrong, Asher.”

“I know.”

 

“As an artist, you do not recognize any limits. All great artists study the masters only to break their rules and establish their own. With your Brooklyn Crucifixions, you have become a true artist. It is but the beginning, Asher.”

“I know.”

“You have more to tell me.”

It was not a question, but a statement.

“I talked to the Rebbe.”

He nodded. I went on.

 

“He said that I have crossed a boundary and he cannot help me now. He said that I am alone.” My eyes pleaded with Jacob Kahn, but he offered no mercy.

 

“He is right. Asher, an artist is always alone. He must discover his own path. He must walk his own path. An artist does not have a family or a home. He is a rebel.”

 

He sighed wearily.

 

“Asher, I told you once that art is for pagans and goyim. Art is your only religion. You must follow only our laws. And then break them.”

He looked into my eyes and must have seen something there. I do not know what. All I knew were hot tears slowly filled my eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “The world is not a pretty place. Let go of your grief.”

He looked again.

“You have accepted your fate.”

“Yes.” I nodded, not caring about the tears that ran down my face. I did not wipe them away.

“Good. Where do you plan to go?”

“Paris. Anna suggested Leningrad and Moscow.”

“Yes, and Florence?”

I shrugged.

“Florence is a gift.”

“Yes.” I agreed.

“I am an old man, Asher. But I am content. I told you I have sculpted a David, a living David. I am complete. Someday you will paint a Guernica, Asher. And you will understand.”

 

He coughed. “I am tired of this bed, Asher. I want to get up and sculpt. But I do not think it will happen.”

“You are an impossible old man. But you will reach ninety.”

He laughed, a sound that warmed my heart.

“Perhaps, Asher. This impossible old man is not ready to go yet. He has yet to see his fledgling fly.” He paused. “I am proud, Asher Lev.”

I smiled. “I wish you well, Jacob Kahn. May you sculpt again soon.”

I bent over quickly and embraced him. My master, my mentor. He stiffened in surprise, then embraced me in return. When I pulled away, I saw a smile on his face.

 

“Good luck, Asher Lev.”

*************************

Once aboard the plane, I waved to Anna Schaeffer and Tanya Kahn. They gestured back, grinning and yelling good luck. Other passengers loading onto the plane stared at me. I laughed at what they must have seen, a young man dressed in the ritual fringes of an observant Jew, whose scruffy red hair hung out of a frayed fisherman’s cap.

 

Then the plane took off and I was in the sky, looking down into the endless depths of the ocean. The waves shone like glass in the light of the sun. Like fractured glass.

 

I took out my unfinished painting and stared at it. The words of Jacob Kahn rang in my ears. The world is not a pretty place. Let go of your grief.

 

I made the world pretty, Mama.

 

Asher, will you stop this foolishness?

 

Be careful of the Other Side, Asher Lev.

 

He has dark burning eyes.

 

Suddenly I knew what to draw. Picking up a brush, I completed the night sky, painting swiftly, surely. My brush made bold confident strokes in streaks of metallic silver. In a short time, I viewed the result of my efforts. In the empty darkness of the sky, two huge stars blazed out, a pair of burning heavenly eyes. The divine and demonic. I laughed at the irony. But it was still incomplete.

 

Why didn’t you draw the pretty birds and flowers, Asher?

 

“Yes, I’ll draw you birds and flowers, Mama.”

 

In the icy waters of the street river, I painted golden flowers, the color of my mother’s hair. Their crescent shaped petals were slips of pale fire. I worked them in Renaissance gold, saffron, and cream yellows, cheerful hues that betrayed their character, flaunting the destructive nature of fire. The flaming blossoms floated down the rapids, tossed and splattered, but never doused. Their own wild heat singed them inside out, charring them to scorched tones of burnt sienna and raw umber. Their flames seared the water, those tears of winter, and sent up trails of white steam. Those vaporous plumes were silent testimony to the pain of the both the flaming flowers and the roaring river, their condensed screams of agony. I thought pensively, “Perhaps they will both die in pain, those who hurt and those who have been hurt.”

 

Everything that lives must die.

 

“Yes Papa.”

 

In the emptiness of the sky, I sketched flocks of scarlet birds. Their wings were outstretched in glorious flight, fan-shaped tails flared, shapely heads pointing upward, frenzied in their ecstasy. They pulsed with the vibrant tints I bestowed upon them, wine red and rose. With a prompt mood change, I scribbled on, depicting the fragile creatures plummeting to the snowy earth, or swallowed by the raging waters. Their broken wings drooped clumsily at impossible angles, angles that I exaggerated with harsh strokes of my palette knife. My hands painted vehemently while my eyes watched reverently. I saw bloody shapes of vermilion and burgundy tumbling like teardrops onto the chaste snow. Crimson fledglings soared in rapture; delicate birds fell, eyes burning brightly, too blinded by their own brilliant plumage to notice their rapid descent. Dead birds, eyes glazed, wings extended, and talons curled, dotted the river like beads of spilt blood.

 

I leaned back and appraised my work. Unbidden, my mind recognized a disturbing comparison. Those falling ruby birds transformed unexpectedly into clipped locks of red hair, severed payos that fell, neglected, from those burning eyes.

 

As I gazed, I knew I had just broken the last link to my past. No longer would my mythic ancestor thunder in my sleep. I looked up to the sun blushing on the eastern horizon. I was headed toward that light, armed with the blessing of the Rebbe and my gift. I reached into my pocket for the plane ticket. “Florence,” read the black script.

 

Yes, Florence is a gift.

 

Finally, I glanced at my work again and chuckled. For the first time, I noticed the unwieldy canvas was propped up against the back of the seat in front of me. The passenger sitting there gaped at me. I looked at him, then extended my hand.

 

“My name is Asher Lev.”

 

Unnerved, he turned away. I dropped my hand.

 

My brushes lay on fold-up tray usually reserved for food. They had stained the tray and the seat, as well as my person, with specks of paint. Never mind. It is a good painting; I did not hold back. A work of two worlds—ice and flame, light and dark, divine and demonic. Jacob Kahn would be pleased.

 

I leaned back in my seat, refusing to yield to the urge to look back, and catch a last glimpse of the place I had called home. Instead I gazed forth, towards my destiny. A world of art awaits me in Florence, one that will either cherish or reject this new painting. I did not try to fool myself. It is a world of the sitra achra. It is not a world of rigid religion and brittle laws. It is not a world for the Hasidic Jew. But it is enough.

 

It is but the beginning, Asher.

 

On impulse, I reached for a phone and dialed a number I had dialed many times before.

 

“Hello?” It was the voice of Anna Schaeffer.

 

“Meet me in Florence, Anna. I have a new painting for you.”

[Beautiful Nightmare]

O i really like this wow u write long stuff took my a while to read wow its very good though i really love it!