Waste Land to a Scream: A Gay Science

Novel 019

19. “To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.” Nietzsche

109 Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, Paris. 16 July 1916.

Rip. Tear. Stitch.

Ripose.

And begin again - the paint splattered and forms took shape with a shade not seen before nor ever since. It was not Cubism - but it pieced together the angles that would become Cubism.

Pablo considered the striking lines and then again again with a different idea that the women on the page called to him. And then he considered again not knowing whether he liked what he had painted but knew that it was color and form gestated in the back of his mind.

He remembered this so long ago, in a distant land before there was war—the Great War.

Dripping down his forehead was the sweat of his imagination, he could see it now even though it was now in a gallery for modern pictures in a modern sense. Originally it was made in Bateau-Lavoir the 18th arrondissement, just below the picturesque jostling of painters, musicians, and ne’er-do-wells on the right bank of the River Seine, though far far far away in the gullies and street lamp lit. it was cluttered with buildings tight and complex but still scruffy.

But now it was in a gallery the painted prostitutes stared back taunting him. Pablo looked around the gallery and what he saw was a shock, but it was the shock of the new staring in the faces. then another man, Georges Braque, came up behind him. he to study the large canvas with five fleshy ripe nudes, with their corollary and shapes out of mathematics which did not work in the real world but took form in the flat.

George spoke: "I remember how long it took you to battle with the demons of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. In your youth you painted three canvases a day and yet this one took you more than a year."

"I sketched and drew to get the proportions wrong and that is what made the proportions correct in their subtlety and grace."

Then slowly a mob formed most of them did not know what to make and many of them sneered at the elongated arms. One man almost tried to spit but he could not because, at the same time, the repulsion gripped his hands a realization captured his face - and he was transfixed between grotesquerie and illumination. Pablo looked at the man's face and simply grinned with a leering pestilence as if he too had this same feeling as he worked and reworked the white oils until they were just so.

Then Braque looked at the other paintings and none of them made such a commotion.

"It seems to me that the sublime has touched your paint brushes and given you that gift of the shock of the strange."

Pablo then sighed and then he said: "You know how long I have hidden this piece in silence because I did not yet think the world was ready for it."

"I know. I still do not think the world is ready for the explosion enacted on the canvas that you have delivered. It grips the eye and forces the sound of the essence to align with the beat of a different drum."

However, Pablo looked at the faces, most with shock at the different way in which the artist had depicted the harem on the street with nothing but their hair and eyelashes to bewitch the men to come in and partake of the sins of the flesh. and the men who were standing staring at the picture could not detach themselves from its eerily enthrallment even if they had some woman attached to them like a bond. the women knew that this was what the men truly wanted: the ecstasy of the forbidden and the detachment when it was time to go.

All on 109 Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré on the right bank of the Seine war still raging in the backdrop.