In Which Into Each Life Some Construction Must Fall

At St. Patrick's

by MARK ARTURO

He's the the only man I regret.

Stress comes and goes in waves at this time. Recently I read a novel about the adventures of a bird in a human's body. The bird becomes very depressed, as you might imagine, and eventually catches a cold because he gets claustrophobic in rooms and has to walk the streets. Eclipsing what I believed the basic difference between a bird and a man, he is disappointed to be so large.

This is the first fact of being a man he understands as difficult, and strains at it.

I have been a man since the early 1980s. This was a low period for St. Patrick's Cathedral. They had plenty of money, but not so many parishioners. This is what the security guard at the North door tells me. I am not allowed to bring the only object into St. Patrick's that I would really like to, which is a miracle.

The bird eventually, and I read this on wikipedia since I could not finish the book, becomes obsessed with Ella Fitzgerald and wishes to meet her. The novel kind of had Blade Runner vibes. I wouldn't recommend it.

I remember my first teacher on the subject. She told me that the thing people do most often that gives them away is they blink too much. You can't measure a heartrate from across the room.

Spending a lot of time in the cathedral has its perks. You've never seen construction workers so well-behaved and giggly. Jesus, I think, would love these men. The only thing that reminds me of our lord, then, is something outside of the church, that seems to be preying on it as it reinstates a fastidiousness of purpose I have always found entirely at odds with faith.

There was a certain amount of time, as a mere child, when I questioned the ways of this place.

If faith was for everyone, then it would be meaningless. Defined by his most moral enemy, Michael came to earth, not bothering to disguise the fact that he was the greatest of angels. He asked all his devout, "Do you think I appear this way to those who displease me?" and they shook their heads.

Some believed. You can walk out that north entrance to the cathedral to Saks Fifth Avenue, and it always feels seamless. When I knew the bishop here, he would never do any shopping - he hated the long escalators, the feeling of being in a rat's maze. He said, "A holy place can be nicer than a store, a factory, a restaurant. But it seems it always is, and that's what makes me wonder. I keep waiting for someone to take iconography away from Christians, but they never grab the mantle solidly enough." I recall that I replied it was never ours to begin with.

Of course the bird in the human body misses flying the most. He goes to a man who he believes can restore him his wings. The man refuses to engage with the project unless he knows the reason the bird was changed into a man initially. So the bird inhales the laboratory air, and tells his best, last lie. He says it was an accident.

Keeping the cathedral open during its renovation was half a stroke of genius, half a gauche mistake. It makes me realize that this is a just a place like any other. You can't take pictures in the chapel area, because it's where the saddest of the believers position themselves, and one condition of their grief is that they not be observed by technology.

The bird man meets Ella Fitzgerald. Both of her legs are missing, and she is depressed. The bird man leaves disappointed.

I wish to meet Michael one day. I dream of it. I hope he will come to see me here, in this place, so I wait for him. If he does not come, I know it means he does not like this place. If he comes to Saks Fifth Avenue, I might assume he does not like St. Patrick's Cathedral, but it could be just that he slightly missed his mark. If he visits in my sleep I will try to tell him the miracle, which is this: sometimes I feel I have been on this earth for too long.

Mark Arturo is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about JMW Turner's theory of color.

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In Which We Find His Theory Of Color Implausible

Shades of Turner

by MARK ARTURO

Joseph Mallord William Turner never stopped thinking about color. When he woke, it was color, it was color before he went to bed. Not just the range, not just the spectrum: the emotional resonances, clashes and collusions, its general mien.

In the final analysis he rejected any determinative theory on the subject, although he read and agreed with some of what George Field had argued in Chromatics, or an Essay on the Analogy and Harmony of Colors, published in 1817. For Field, color was merely an extension of a central philosophy, the former having been deduced from the latter. For Turner, a subscriber to Field's Outline of Analogical Philosophy, his interest in these intersections was as a skeptic, which is not to say he did not read Field's various silly musings with some avidity.

As a young man he had traveled to Paris for the first time, essentially to see what sort of color he could find. His mission was confined to observations in the Louvre; he spoke very little French.

Turner made twenty-five copies of the paintings he saw there. He paid particular attention to the color paintings of Titian, lavishing hour after hour in view of the Pastoral Concert, which was painted either by Giorgione or his disciple Titian in 1509.

Where Turner differed from Field was in the idea that the subject could be reduced to a specific theory or worldview. Admiration flowed in only one direction. Turner's first and worst biographer writes that Field told him, "Turner's most extravagant conceptions were a perfect harmony." There is a bit of an insult in this seeming compliment, for Turner was far from delighted by Field's praise becuse of how faciley the man described his work as, impossibly, squaring the circle.

For him, these matters were not at all simple. Self-trained, Turner always sought to educate himself further on the subject of light, to the point where even his painter friends grew tired of the subject. He kept his own notebooks on light's various properties. In them, he defined color as a "material substance indued with a quality of diversely affecting the Eye according to the matter wherein it is found."

A practical approach suited Turner better - after all, he was first and foremost a working artist. He broke things down as follows:

YELLOW: Glory

BLUE: Duty

RED: Power

GREEN: Servitude

PURPLE: Authority

"Comparatively," he wrote, "Red possesses the utmost power of attracting vision: it being the first ray of Light." From the air, yellow would be "medium, red material, blue distance, white in prismatic order in the union." Rainbows and prisms occupied a particular fascination for Turner; they were something like looking at all of one's ex-girlfriends assembled together in a room.

In London Turner discovered a daguerrotypist named John Mayall who had taken several views of Niagara Falls. Mayall was distinctly puzzled by the strange, slightly portly man who came to his shop, rarely saying a word. Turner only sought to watch Mayall work, and after the man's labors were done, he would engage him in conversation about the color spectrum before taking his leave.

At a party for the Royal Society Turner attracted many admirers. Noticing this, Mayall asked who his visitor was to garner so much attention. His companion stared at him as if he had grown a second nose. "That's Turner," the man said. "That Turner."

Subsequently, Mayall approached Joseph with a cocktail and offered his help freely. Turner redirected the conversation to the spectrum. In ensuing years the artist referred Mayall a great number of customers, but never visited his shop again.

George Field was not Turner's only academic target on color. In 1840 came the first translation of Goethe's Theory of Colours. Turner read it before it arrived in England because of his friendship with the book's publisher, and his annotated copy of Theory of Colours is as close as we will ever get to a definitive text from him on the subject.

Where Goethe writes, "Every single opposition in order to be harmonious must comprehend the whole," Turner adds in his neat handwriting, "or ought to be a part." The main disagreement between the two men boiled down to their ideas of where color originated from: for Goethe, it began when "light meets the dark," for Turner color emerged entirely from light. In a way, it seems that both are so.

Mark Arturo is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about his college relationship.

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In Which After Death He Was Returned To Life

Walk the Dog

by MARK ARTURO

for B.

With distressing clarity, I recall the first time I saw her. Blonde hair was tied back unceremoniously, a glut of premeds shuffled back and forth to obstruct my view. A TA named Avad tapped on her bony shoulder and said, "I hope you're feeling better. I didn't think you were going to make it."

My sophomore year of college had dissipated all the excitement of the previous spring. My new residence was further from the center of campus, yet I felt no escape. My favorite freshman, Amil, was rooming with a goofy CS major named Sanja who was planning a startup that allowed you to watch other people using their computers; they called such invasions "veeping." Amil was also slowly dating every Jewish woman in the junior class.

As a consequence, I was left to my other friends, with whom I alternately felt a great kinship and, intermittently, disappointment. One was a lanky homosexual whose boyfriend was so glorious looking he could not be spoken to without laborious pauses. After awhile, it was obvious our interests had largely diverged and we had only Iris Murdoch in common.

My other roommate was the scion of a wealthy and influential family who unsurprisingly was about as self-aware as a horned toad. He was dating a girl from a local junior college who looked like a shaved weasel and laughed at all the correct times. Last year, I heard she became a gastroenterologist.

I would not say I felt alone; rather I simply felt apart. I only went to the dining hall at odd times: after lunch, or before the dinner rush, so that I could eat alone and read as I had done since I was a boy.

It was there I saw her doing the same, eating by herself. I have always been a complete expert at knowing exactly how to observe someone without them knowing. I was doing so, but she was onto me in mere more moments, and I felt exposed.

Information about any one undergraduate was not hard to come by. My friend Audrey spent most of her free time, in between extensive conferences on the ills of various disadvantaged people, collecting such information in the carrels of the library.

In that prosaic place there was always a disturbing tendency for people to share adderall and complain about the hours they spent in the place complaining about the hours they spent in the place. Extracting gossip from Audrey was never tedious, since her charisma was nearly contagious, her judgments were sharp, and her sexuality was so broadly appealing it could never be precisely honed in on, just appreciated from afar like a Vermeer.

Audrey's roommate was a prickly pear named Lauren who wore a thick winter coat even on the cusp of summer. The trouble with obtaining information from either of them was that it was just as likely to make it back to the source before you made use of it yourself.

Once I had tried the opposite tact, signaling a lack of lack interest in their wide knowledge, and that had turned out just as badly for me. I believe the woman I ended up offending now clerks for a justice in the court of appeals.

I devised a better, finer strategy. I swore Audrey to secrecy and pretended like I was going to cry. Probably the vow meant nothing, but it was better than giving her a license to deal.

My remote dining companion's name was Kay, and she was from Montana or Idaho, most probably the latter. Can you imagine? Audrey told me faux-breathlessly. Kay had been dating a guy expelled from school for hacking into the school's advisor program and switching some assignments around, for what reason Audrey did not know. He still lived on campus but they were very definitely no longer together. I tried to swallow this bitter pill and I knew Sanja would have all the information I required about such a person.

Braving the small room he and my friend Amil shared was ever a pain. It smelled of pot and semen, not actually a terrible smell, but never an expected one. The two of them were constantly on their personal computer, and it could never be said they did not practice what they preached. They exclusively listened to remixes of familiar electronic songs, and were willing to explain at any given moment why the guys in Justice were the finest musicians ever to live among mortals.

I heard the rest of the story from Kay herself. They had actually come to school together, against her parents' wishes. From what she hinted at, the attraction was mostly animal, and she subtly suggested she had never been with anyone else, although I never knew if that were truly the case.

Kay's roommate was the daughter of a fairly prominent New England politician, and the girl never went to class, preferring to smoke opium and watch reruns of Adventure Time. As it happened, she was a very talented artist and I judged her far less harshly than Kay did. I think she is married with two kids now.

Kay and this grizzly beacon of sexuality - even I had to admit he was sort of beautiful, in a wild way - had not broken up over this scandal. Instead he had been cheating on her with the daughter of a diplomat. Even though this did not really bother her for no reason I could fathom, apparently her boyfriend's guilt had corrupted what still existed between them. He works for the Obama administration now.

Still, I would not approach Kay at the square tables that held whatever counted as food in this institution. I rarely lingered at the library either, too fearful Audrey would ask me for developments in the case, since I could offer her none.

But the next semester we had a class together. The world was in a better mood; everyone carried a blanket around with them as if a picnic or bath was right around any corner. Irony was employed just as often, but without the jaded aplomb it was accompanied by that previous winter. Churls were absorbed by crowds and campus was taken over by an aromatic, pervasive mien reminiscent of Rome before the fall.

Before Kay had only been a vision of the season, like a clump of snow that might disappear on a wet afternoon. Now I saw she truly had no idea of herself or what she was, and I myself grew cold towards her at that realization, since I believe every thinking person should be possessed of the knowledge of how others view them.

First frost encourages carnivores and scavengers alike, any repulsion is sure to attract the finest of nature's creatures. We are all animals, but some of us have been educated out of our ignorance more precisely than others.

The professor, squat and Jewish like a thumb, saw through me in a very pleasant way, and we shared a common view the comedies are really tragedies, and vice versa. We both hated Falstaff without being able to explain why. It was a small seminar, and I recall the other students well. They took to the material the same way I did, and I cannot watch the ghastly ending of Twelfth Night without thinking of us all there.

A few weeks into the term, Kay began to ask me questions about class and the assignments. The comedies of Shakespeare were probably my best subject. My professor had a border collie named Margarine who sat peaceably in the back of our class. Sometimes I would walk her, since my professor had a bad knee and the happy dog was in her prime. Kay eventually came with me at his request, and I start with anger thinking of his matchmaking.

We spoke of her illness eventually, a yearlong struggle with lymphoma that she had not fully recovered from. She survived, she said, but she was not as she was before her illness, although I noticed nothing of this in all the time I knew her. She speculated at length whether that had been the reason the bearded boy had cheated on her, and shocked me by asking what I thought. My first reaction was one of sympathy or empathy. I have always confused the two, but I hardened myself against that, because no woman desires a therapist, and confusing pity with sexual attraction is a childish act.

Instead I said that I thought someone who cheated was likely to do so when the occasion offered it, and that malice or forethought rarely entered into the equation. At that she laughed.

It seemed like we both liked the idea of being friends, and I am far from ashamed to admit I needed one. I dismissed thoughts of possessing her, but only for a time, the way a pig does not know the hunger for finer meals when he consumes his slop.

Kay always called me on such lazy metaphors. She did not yet consider herself a writer, but she loathed cliche as if she were. Quickly I found out she was a bit more knowledgeable of her charms than I had thought. When she drank, she became an exaggerated version of her considered self, until one night she asked me, in a winning way, why I never touched her.

I suppose I blushed at that, but my skin rarely admits such imperfections on a surface level. There is no good way to answer that question - it was evident to everyone how much time we spent together, and just as clear to my friends that I wanted her. Every time I saw Audrey that spring she would get this mischievous look in her eyes and whimper, "Whyyyy not?"

So I told Kay there was no reason, but isn't it better to be friends? She pretended to agree for a moment, and then was on me. Have you ever held the earth, the soil? It is much the same.

I thought I knew sex, had comprehended its performative aspects. The difference between desire in general and desire for one such as Kay is the difference between the moon and the earth, and I have already told you she was the earth and not the sky. It is one thing to know that a single person, a particular animal is able to please another by putting mouth to cock, or thigh to face, or mingling among each other's clothes and smells. But that is a movement towards intimacy, not the thing itself. The performance aspect so sweetly evaporated, like the discarding of a layer that had always been there, invisible to the eye. What took over then I have never been able to name or recreate except in art.

I don't know what Kay is doing now. The border collie died a few years ago. My professor still teaches, half as many classes as he did. Audrey is the chief of a hospital's geriatric unit, her roommate works for Goldman Sachs. Recovered from his death, Jesus walked the earth. The common thread in all of these epilogues is that we never fully know what will become of those we loved.

Mark Arturo is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. He last wrote in these pages about the other life besides this one. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

Paintings by Theora Hamblett.

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