Month: February 2006

 

 

From somewhere he heard a few hesitant notes from a piano. Perhaps it was coming from the back room, but it sounded even further away than that. It was the sound of a piano stretched to the point where it could possibly not even be a piano you were hearing. It could have been an audio hallucination, or just some of the loose and jangling noise of the world. There was no pattern, just a random pinging at the high end of the keyboard. Silence, then a burst of four or five notes.

He went through the front room and into a hallway heavy with shadows. The place was sealed up tight, and only an occasional angle of light snuck in from outside, crepuscular and loaded with slow cruising dust. There was blood on the kitchen floor, a substantial patch of it, cooled to the black edge of maroon, and become almost chalk, or tempera powder. It had splashed up onto the cupboards and across the refrigerator door.

From the kitchen window he could see out into the backyard, where there was an empty doghouse, and there he found his piano: a clunky set of windchimes swaying slowly from a clothesline pole.

At the end of town there were ruins of an ancient fort, perched right at the edge of the ocean on a hill. The ramparts and parapet were all more or less in place, thrown up around a cluster of terraces, each of them situated at a different height and connected by a series of damp tunnels and stone steps and the occasional wooden ladder. Above it all at the southermost end overlooking the water was a large terrace, completely exposed to the stars and sky.

He made his way through the tight lanes of the town to this fort, and through the labyrinths of the fort to the terrace above the ocean. It was a wonderful place for silence; whatever sound made the journey up there was oddly transformed and amplified. The voices from the little tavern at the bottom of the hill sounded as if they were rising from a great well.

The whine of an unseen boat in the darkness lulled him almost to sleep. He saw blazing cruiseships creeping along the distant horizon, and, exhausted and splayed on his back, watched stars crashing again and again into the ocean.

 

 

—Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1953

–Zellar, Basement Window, 2005

Monsieur Centrine was a fierce proponent of impossibility. That’s not to say he was one of these characters who will insist that anything is possible. Quite the contrary, in fact. Mssr. Centrine believed that life, the world, and every aspiration of the human heart represented a thoroughly impossible proposition.

From this belief he could not, and would not, be swayed by anything in the way of evidence to the contrary. Achievement or accomplishment that appeared to clearly refute his insistence on the thorough impossibility of everything was dismissed with a growl and wave of his fat hand.

Mssr. Centrine would not even grant such incidents –and he was routinely presented with many such incidents– the status of aberration, and he had no tolerance for the notion of miracles. No, Centrine chose instead to entirely deny the reality of the possible in any of its manifestations.

“That is quite simply impossible!” he would say. “It is inconceivable!”

Despite this stubborn embrace of what would seem to be a paralyzing idea, Mssr. Centrine was a man of considerable intelligence, immodest talent, and wide-ranging accomplishment. Presented with proposals that were easily within the range of his abilities, he would, without fail, offer one of his usual exclamations: “Never! I won’t even consider the idea! It can’t be done!” And then, inevitably, he would proceed to do whatever it was that had been asked of him, and to do it well.

Whenever he had succeeded in demonstrating the possibility of the very things he had proclaimed impossible, Mssr. Centrine would of course decline all praise and congratulations by protesting that what he had just done was, in fact, quite impossible.

Over time Centrine’s perverse world view permeated the thinking of many of those who were closest to him, to the point where there were some who began to regard the man as a sort of miracle worker or magician. Such, apparently, was the persuasive conviction of Mssr. Centrine.

Eventually, however, something appeared to shift in the man’s attitude, or perhaps it was a sort of evolution in his way of thinking about the question of impossibility. It seemed to some observers that Mssr. Centrine’s denials of the widest range of the possible became more reckless and extreme. Many of the things he now pronounced as impossible were, in fact, quite clearly impossible, and yet he would nonetheless attack these challenges with the odd determination of the possessed.

It was almost as if Centrine had come to believe the claims of his small legion of admirers, and that he had somehow become convinced that he alone was equipped to conquer all manner of impossibility. For a time he succeeded in many spectacular and seemingly impossible endeavors.

In the end, however, it was a challenge of a more prosaic sort that ultimately did in Mssr. Centrine.

While strolling one day with a small group of his followers, Centrine had paused for a moment to survey the intersection of a quiet and absolutely ordinary street.

“This street is utterly impassable!” he pronounced. “One cannot possibly hope to make it to the other side. It is impossible!”

And with that he plunged blindly from the curb out into the crosswalk and was immediately struck down by a garbage truck as it came hurtling around the corner.

—Mark Rothko, Black on Gray, 1969

–Zellar, Carpet, Shadows, 2006