Full Fathom Five
an original story
I can’t believe that this guy Bristow is so famous for painting. Painting. What is this, the middle ages? Seriously? It makes you wonder what other obsolete technology will become the next hipster fad. 2-d movies? Paper books?
Dave “The Beast” Smith, popular holoblogger
The city lights through my airplane window reminded me of my first — and, thus far, only — time offworld. That moment of looking back at the earth surrounded by a sea of stars is a sublime moment in the true Burkean sense, one something that artists and poets have expressed far better than I ever could. I would love to say that looking down at the oceans and continents gave me an epiphany about the unity of man or the fragility of our planet’s ecosystem, but in truth the experience remains something that I cannot put into words.
Unfortunately, that sublime moment proved to be the sole highlight of a mostly interminable experience.
I am sure that, at one point, spaceflight held all the romance and experience of the dawn of a new era. That time, however, has long since past, and I must report that my voyage to Mars was a snail-paced, claustrophobic, deeply tedious three weeks, far more aggravating than even the many rounds of grant writing that proceeded it. The comparatively archaic terrestrial airplane felt positively luxurious in comparison; I breathed a sigh of relief when I put my drink down and the earth’s gravity prevented it from floating away as if possessed by a mischievous spirit.
I looked down at the eastern seaboard until the plane rose above the clouds. I thought of our descent upon a new world of sorts and of how it might have been an equally sublime experience that I was too tired and worn out to properly appreciate.
My com showed the usual messages about faculty meetings and budget cuts and then projected a hologram of Elise Anchando into the space above the pull-down tray. I had first met her years ago, when I interned at her father’s gallery during my postgraduate years. Nowadays, the Anchando Gallery is a household name, at least in some artistically inclined households, but , but back then Hector Anchando struggled to afford rent. He had an intense passion for, and the solar system’s largest collection of, the paintings of Klaus Singh, a post-painterly romantic neo-expressionist who was thought of as irrecoverably passé just ten years ago. Hector hung onto those canvases, however, and Singh’s untimely death and subsequent cult following septupled their market value. Mr. Anchando has, of course, retired to the south of France like his hero Matisse, leaving the business in the capable hands of his daughter who is even shrewder now than when I knew her then.
Elise’s hologram thanked me for helping her with this emergency at such short notice, informed me that her flight would arrive around two hours after mine, and asked me to give Jefferson Scott Bristow her best wishes when I visited him at the hospital.
With a long night ahead of me I let my thoughts drift back to Mars. As I said before, I arrived there exhausted and bereft of enthusiasm, a state not improved by the extensive decontamination process and accompanying paperwork. Moreover, films and holograms had not prepared me for encountering Martians. While I pride myself on being tolerant and open-minded, and have counted Martians as friends and colleagues ever since I visited their world, I must say that my younger self was simply not ready for the effects of Martian gravitation on the human form; the tall gaunt people reminded me of nothing so much as the Giacomettis I had seen in Los Angeles. Two or three days of craning my neck to look up at the daddy-long-legs people as well as dealing with the effects of Martian gravity on my digestive system made me more than homesick for earth.
Nonetheless I had come to Mars for a reason, and refused to let anything get in the way of my work; I would have conducted my research if it meant dealing with the little green men with which centuries-old science fiction writers once populated the planet. I took the magnet train through billowing red sand hills to my ultimate destination, the Holy and Sacred Apostolic Cathedral Church of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ of the Martian Polar Regions. (I will henceforth use its more common name, the Martian Great Cathedral.) When the storms stopped hurling sand against my window I looked out at the vast desert and felt a sense of the half-discovered world that had compelled me to make the spaceflight in the first place. The cathedral spire rose above the horizon, visible for great distances.
When I teach a survey course about Martian visual art I always try to impress on my students how completely Martian gravity transformed architecture; it removed limitations that have restricted earthly builders for millennia and allowed Martian architecture to soar skyward like the three-stage rockets that brought the first settlers. The Martian Great Cathedral takes the shape of an immense tree of life, its trunk as tall and thin as the Martians themselves, its crystal leaf branches reaching high into the thin air.
The train stopped at Port Wells, a domed settlement entirely engulfed by the cathedral’s shadow when the sun was low in the sky. Jeff Bristow, the first earthman I had seen in days, came on the train loaded down with sketchpads and canvases. We began talking about the famed cathedral, our mutual destination, and he told me about the paints that he had made himself from pigments in the red soil in an effort to create a new, authentic Martian painting style. I told him about my own study of Martian architectural sculpture and we spent many days discussing art in the shadow of the cathedral tower as he sketched reddish desert views dominated by the cathedral tree while I catalogued the apotropaic dragons, gargoyles, griffins, mermaids, and green men that lurked in its gnarled roots.
He also introduced me to a cadre of expatriate earthlings in Port Wells, a group that enabled many of our, mostly his, romantic and alcoholic misadventures. (You can, I’m sure, forgive our younger selves for the joy we took at being around the few girls on the planet who did not bring Halloween scarecrows to mind.)
A voice on the plane’s intercom instructed me to buckle my seat-belt and prepare for landing.
If, as more charitable critics assert, Bristow’s mannered, derivative oils capture something essentially Martian, then the tedious ineptitude of his brushwork provides yet another example of the red planet’s status as a cultural wasteland.
Jacques St. Jacques VI, connoisseur and art collector
The elevator brought me to a white-on-white-on-white waiting room that smelled of artificial flowers. Speakers hidden in the walls played the soothing sounds of flowing water accompanied by birds and a harpsichord. I sat down and checked my com with a morbid curiosity about what latest cultural atrocity our society had inflicted on itself. The receptionist called for me, confirmed that my name is indeed Professor Thomas Chan, and sent me down the echoing corridor.
I took a seat opposite the doctor in her office, a room as bleak and windowless as the waiting room. I was too preoccupied to notice much about her. She asked me if I had heard of cake.
“Do you mean birthday cake? Coffee cake?”
“Not quite,” she said. “It’s spelled ‘kake,’ with a ‘k,’ and it is essentially a kid’s birthday cake with its flour and icing adulterated with rum, sedatives, and mild hallucinogens. Drugs, sugar, fat, alcohol, carbs, nostalgia. In short, it’s the most insidious consumer product that’s ever been conceived.”
“It would explain much of the behavior that I’ve seen on campus.”
“Your buddy,” she said, with a sarcastic smile, “Has developed quite a taste for it. He got a bad batch at a party last night. We sent one of the remaining slices to the lab and they found that the sprinkles were almost pure concentrated morphine. He’s good to go now, but we did have to pump his stomach and put him on this prescription.” She handed me the bottle and as I walked out the door I realized that she must have gone through this spiel multiple times per day.
His eyelids were heavy and his face looked older and wearier than when I had last seen him at his recent, critically disastrous one-man show at a gallery in New York.
The eyes themselves looked glassy.
We shook hands. “It’s amazing what they can do these days,” he said in a hoarse voice. “They just pump you full of drugs and send you on your way. How are you doing, Tommy? Thanks so much for coming out here.”
I avoided the delicate subject and told him about developments in the department and about some of my students’ more embarrassing projects — every student writing a term paper about impressionism seems hellbent on confusing Monet and Manet — as we took the elevator to basement garage. He politely nodded all the way to my car but anything more than a ‘yeah’ or a ‘really’ seemed to physically pain him. I opened the door and got him to light up somewhat by mentioning the outrageous price that a Chinese trillionaire had paid for a decidedly average 22nd century post-post-neo-post-minimalist conceptual piece.
I decided to say something as we pulled out of the garage and onto the overcast street. “I know you probably don’t want to talk about what happened, and I’m not going to force it, but I am your friend and I have a non-trivial knowledge of art and artists and I think I have a good idea of what your problem is.”
“What?” His brain had always been visual rather than verbal.
“I talked to Elise. Her flight should be here in half an hour, if it hasn’t been delayed. She said, in not so many words, that she needs you to get things together and start painting again. She is running a business, of course. I told her that she had it backwards and that last night, which I’m not going to bring up again, happened because you’re not painting. Is that far off the mark?”
“No,” he said, and the words began trickling out. “It’s just that, I don’t know what you would call it, but I’m scared to death that there’s no room left for me.”
“What do you mean?” The trickle became a torrent.
“We’ve been making art for thousands of years on this planet and I’m worried that there’s nothing left for me or anyone else to do. I mean, how could I possibly paint Italy like Corot, or England like Turner? The thing is, people have painted and drawn and photographed everything on the face of the earth from every possible angle. What can I do? What new thing is there left to do? I thought it was Mars, you know, but there’s no way that I can ever go back there. That’s a once in a lifetime thing.”
“To be fair,” I replied, “Both of us are very lucky that we got the opportunity to go there once. The vast, vast majority of people never get that chance, to say nothing of Martians getting to visit old Earth.”
“I know, and this is going to sound like a pipe dream, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the Jupiter system. That’s the real wild west, don’t you think? Think about Europa and how its landscapes are completely unexplored by painters. As far as I know, no painter has ever been anywhere near there. If I could just afford it.”
“Well, Jeff, everything I’ve read has led me to believe that, once the youthful enthusiasm has passed, this problems hangs over the head of every artist for the rest of their lives. It seems to me that there are three ways out, so to speak. The easiest, of course, is to give up these ‘pretensions’ and live a normal life. Next, you can spend your life recycling what’s come before and hopefully get some money and fame from less discerning audiences. Finally, what all the artists we remember did was talk to the past and find a way of asserting their own individuality within the tradition. That,” I paused for dramatic effect, “Is your challenge.”
His face showed the gravity of the purpose. I would have said more but we had arrived at his apartment building; I thought of Van Gogh in Arles as he walked up the steps. On the drive back to the hotel I wracked my mind for something that I could do.
When Bristow mentions ‘capturing the real Mars’ in his artist’s statement, we would do well to recall Foucault’s distrust of such socially constructed ‘truths’ as an interrogation of Bristow’s discourse reveals a failure to negotiate the lived experiences of Martian spaces, an othering artist-flaneur’s eye/I that problematically reinforces a preexisting geocentric, Gramscian hegemony over a continuingly marginalized Martian cult/ure(s.)
Prof. A.S. Lee, academic
Our lobster-colored submarine descended beneath the waves.
“Elise took quite a bit of convincing,” I said, “But in the end I managed to convince her of your need to visit the nearest wilderness.”
“Thanks,” he said, staring blankly at the bubbles, not sure of what to make of my gift. It had seemed to me the closest thing to space.
“There’s an optional audio tour, but I listened to five minutes of it and found it much too dumbed-down for our purposes. As with spacecraft, there are computers constantly monitoring and readjusting our route and I’ve been told that they do it much more efficiently than a human being could. I know it seems strange but I’m sure we’ll return safely unless we encounter Moby-Dick or Scylla and Charybdis on our way back.”
That got no response from him and I decided to forego comparing our current surroundings with the woeful state of space travel. We sat for several minutes accompanied by the sound of air pumps, our vessel diving deeper and deeper. I tried to think of something to say, something about how Turner or Winslow Homer painted the sea, perhaps, but nothing relevant came to mind. Then I looked over at him again and found that his artist’s eyes were transfixed by the ever-changing light from the surface; I realized that there was no need to say anything.
We came upon a kelp forest swaying in the surf, with bright fish like birds among the leaves. The seabed had flattened out into a rocky Zen garden; our sub made a sharp turn and sped at a right angle to the tide. We passed above yellow and white automated kelp harvesters that left small sandstorms in their wake. The flat shelf gave way to a steep cliff and the bulbous domes of the experiment underwater city, now abandoned, at its base. As we drew closer I noticed that the walls had become encrusted with barnacles, and told Jeff what little I knew of the city’s shortened history. The planners had, perhaps inevitably, named it after Atlantis, which proved prophetic in more ways than one.
We descended further; the light went from plein-air to chiaroscuro. The submarine continued on its route, its machinery humming away, and we saw a sunken ship’s hull in the murk beneath us; I imagined eels peering out of its portholes. Both of us felt a kinship with the drowned sailors because we too had once voyaged through a dark, treacherous sea of sorts, the sea of stars.
The seafloor sloped downward and our cabin lights dimmed to enhance the effect. The sub’s external light shone on the roof of an octagonal building in the valley far below.
“Do you know what that is?” I asked over the noise of machinery.
“Can’t say I do.”
“It’s called the ‘Monastery at the Bottom of the Sea,’ although I believe its proper name is something like the Pacific Monastery of Saint Cyriacus the Anchorite. The monks come here because it’s one of the few places left on earth where they can find the inner desert.”
We continued our descent and the water turned black as squid’s ink. We looked out into the abyss and saw anglerfish lights: will’o-the-whisps, stars at night. He took out his sketchbook and drew.
He made several return trips alone in the submarine during his recovery, filling what would have been my seat with a pile of art supplies, and came back to the surface with drawings crammed into every empty space in the cabin. He began expanding these drawings on canvas shortly thereafter.
I decided to put these thoughts down in the hope that they might one day form the basis for an introduction to the inevitable exhibition catalog.
Author’s Note: A story combining two great joys, art history and science fiction. Revising this story to publish it here reminded me of how much I enjoyed writing as this character; I have a vague sequel idea that I’ll try to expand this summer.
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