I have continued, unfortunately, to be of no use to anyone; last Thursday, now six days ago, I had done many things for many people, and for myself, for about two weeks; then at that point I stopped utterly.
I'm helped in this by being finally on research leave: a state both wonderful and, for me, very very dangerous – let's hope I don't completely waste this time, as would be rather typical of me.
But what I have been doing (while doing nothing) is recuperating, I suppose; which has consisted of reading and lying on the couch; and ultimately a burst of William Gibson. So my mind is full of rereading Neuromancer (1984) for two days, then Count Zero (1986) for a day. It's striking how different the endings are of the two books – Neuromancer ends in a digital transcendence that practically vanishes offscreen, as the merely human characters drift away to their lonely, fragmented and dissolving ends; while Count Zero makes sure all its protagonists (at least those who are still alive) move on into happy, supported, family-like lives.
But what I wanted to talk about was the one of three story lines in Count Zero that I always loved, and which, on rereading, I find even more remarkable: the story of Marly, the art dealer recovering from disgrace and betrayal, who is hired to search for the sublime. She is looking for the maker of a group of mysterious box sculptures that are modeled on the work of Joseph Cornell (which appears in the story's background; above is a picture of his Cassiopeia I).
These passages remind me of another beautifully written response to visual art, the descriptions by the character Rita in Paul Monette's early novel The Gold Diggers (1979). The Gold Diggers is Monette trying to break out of his dense poetic voice (as in his wonderful first novel Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978)) into something more popular and suspenseful; ultimately it all gets too plotty and tangled, but the fine poetry about personal emotions and understanding is still all there. And Rita, the art history graduate out of a job, who is going to stay with her gay friend the decorator, will discover a cache of stolen paintings, including a small Cézanne watercolor of a tree: as I remember it, she says to herself it makes her want to go live there, under that tree, forever....
I don't generally have those reactions to visual art – not to the right works, anyway; the pictures I like are often considered pretty second-rate, probably because I need narrative and symbolism and such things (which are better kept for literature or drama). So when the characters of Rita or Marly tell me why a, to me, simple work of art takes their breath away, I value it and try to think about it.
I had forgotten that, toward the end of Count Zero, when Marly finally meets the maker of the boxes (which turns out to be a stray fragment of the artificial intelligences that run everything in Gibson's Sprawl novels), it cuts pieces out of her expensive Paris jacket, pulls from her purse an empty Gauloises packet where her now-dead lover wrote an address, plus the holographic slides she has used to hunt for the boxes, and puts them all together into a new box sculpture for her – summing up the surprises and tragedies of her story, making them into art. She laughs and says, when it hands her the box, "I am honored".
Which makes me wonder: if a small wooden box, with a glass cover, could contain the important elements of my life – or at least a recent part of it – what would be in it?
Perhaps: the cheap little 128MB flash drive with 'Kaletra' stamped on the side – given to me by the drug company as a souvenir of the orange antivirals that both save my life and make me sick; a half-melted candle, I think; perhaps a tarot card – the King of Swords, probably; a page torn from my Moleskine notebooks; one of the polished translucent stones from the bowl next to my bed; and a corner cut from the vivid green trees photographed by my father.
If some genius would arrange those things, so that they made sense....
What you're looking for is called "Bås", at least at IKEA. (Note: å is pronounced like o).
Unfortunatly, IKEA UK does not offer this item, but IKEA Sweden does: http://www.ikea.com/se/sv/catalog/products/96469609
Posted by: Chris | February 27, 2008 at 12:01 PM