City of Saints and Madmen

Blood had obscured all but the “Hoeg” in “Hoegbotton.” Blood had speckled his left hand. It looked nothing like paint: it was too bright. It itched where it had begun to dry.

He closed his eyes and felt the walls of the study rush away from him until he stood at the edge of an infinite darkness. From a great distance, the Owl said, “He will die now. But slowly. Very slowly.

Weaker and weaker until, having suffered considerable pain, he will succumb some hours or days hence.

And we will not lift a feather or finger to help him. We will just watch. Your choice remains the same — finish him and live; don’t and die with him. It is a mercy killing now.”

Lakelooked up at the Owl. “Why me?”

“How do you know you are the first? How do you know you were chosen?”

“That is your answer?”

“That is the only answer I shall ever give you.”

“What could he have done to you for you to be so merciless?”

The Owl looked to the Raven, the Raven to the Stork, and in the sud den quaver, the slight shiver, that passed between them,Lake thought he knew the answer. He had seen the same look pass between artists in the cafes alongAlbumuth Boulevard as they verbally dissected some new young genius.

Lakelaughed bitterly. “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you? You’re envi ous and you want his power, but most of all, you fear him. You’re too afraid to kill him yourself.”

The Owl said, “Make your choice.”

“And the hilarious thing,”Lake said. “The hilarious thing is, you see, that once he’s dead, you’ll have made him immortal.” Was he weeping? His face was wet under the mask.Lake watched, in the silence, the blood seeping from the wound in Bender’s throat. He watched Bender’s hands trembling as if with palsy.

What did the genius composer see in those final moments?Lake wondered later. Did he see the knife, the arm that held it, descending, or did he see himself back in Morrow, by the river, walking through a green field and humming to himself? Did he see a lover’s face contorted with passion? Did he see a moment from before the creation of the fame that had devoured him? Perhaps he saw nothing, awash in the crescendo of his most powerful symphony, still thundering across his brain in a wave of blood.

AsLake bent over Voss Bender, he saw reflected in the man’s eyes the black mask of the Raven, who had stepped nearer to watch the killing.

“Back away!”Lake hissed, stabbing out with the knife. The Raven jumped back.

Lakeremembered how the man in his nightmare had cut his hand apart so methodically, so completely.

He remembered his father’s hands opening to reveal bright treasures, Shriek’s response to his painting of his father’s hands. Ah, but Shriek knew nothing. Even Raffe knew nothing. None of them knew as much as he knew now.

Then, cursing and weeping, his lips pulled back in a terrible snarl, he drew the blade across the throat, pushed down with his full weight, and watched as the life drained out of the world’s most famous composer. He had never seen so much blood before, but worse still there was a moment, a single instant he would carry with him forever, when Bender’s eyes met his and the dullness of death crept in, extinguishing the brightness, the spark, that had once been a life.

“Through His Eyes” has an attitude toward perspective unique among Lake’s works, for it is painted from the vantage point of the dead Voss Bender in an open coffin (an apocryphal event — Bender was cremated), looking up at the people who are looking down, while perspective gradually becomes meaningless, so that beyond the people looking down, we see the River Moth superimposed against the sky and mourners lining its banks. Of the people who stare down at Bender, one isLake, one is a hooded insect catcher, and three are wearing masks — in fact, a reprisal of the owl, raven, and stork from

“The Burning House.” Four other figures stare as well, but they are faceless. The scenes in the background of this monstrously huge canvas exist in a world which has curved back on itself, and the details conspire to convince us that we see the sky, green fields, a city of wood, and the river banks simultaneously.

As Venturi writes, “The colors deepen the mystery: evening is about to fall and the river is growing dim; reds are intense or sullen, yellows and greens are deep-dyed; the sinister greenish sky is a cosmetic reflection of earthly death.” The entirety of the painting is ringed by a thin line of red that bleeds about a quarter of an inch inward. This unique frame suggests a freshness out of keeping with the coffin, while the background scenes are thought to depictLake ’s ideal of Bender’s youth, when he roamed the natural world of field and river. Why didLake choose to show Bender in a coffin? Why did he choose to use montage? Why the red line? Some experts suggest that we ignore the coffi n and focus on the red line and the swirl of images, but even then can offer no coherent explanation.

Even more daring, and certainly unique, “Aria for the Brittle Bones of Winter” creates an equivalence between sounds and colors: a musical scale based on the pictorial intensity of colors in which “color is taken to speak a mute language.” The “hero” rides through a crumbling graveyard to a frozen lake. The sky is dark, but the reflection of the moon, which is also a reflection of Voss Bender’s face, glides across the lake’s surface. The reeds which line the lake’s shore are composed of musical notes, so cleverly interwoven that their identity as notes is not at first evident. Snow is falling, and the flakes are also musical notes — fading notes against the blue-black sky, almost as if Bender’s aria is disintegrating even as it is being performed.

In this most ambitious of all his paintings, Lake uses subtle gradations of white, gray, and blue to mimic the progression of the aria itself — indeed, his brushstrokes, short or long, rough or smooth, duplicate the aria’s movement as if we were reading a sheet of music.

All of this motion in the midst of apparent motionless-ness flows in the direction of the rider, who rides against the destiny of the aria as a counterpoint, a dissenting voice. The light of the moon shines upon the face of the rider, but, again, this is the light of the reflection so that the rider’s features are illuminated from below, not above. The rider, haggard and sagging in the saddle, is unmistakablyLake. (Venturi describes the rider as “a rhythmic throb of inarticulate grief.”) The rider’s expression is abstract, fluid, especially in relation to the starkly realistic mode of the rest of the painting. Thus, he appears ambivalent, undecided, almost unfinished — and, certainly, at the time of the painting, and in relation to Voss Bender,Lake was unfinished.

If “Aria for the Brittle Bones of Winter” is not as popular as even the experimental “Through His Eyes,”

it may be becauseLake has employed too personal an iconography, the painting meaningful only to him.

Whereas in “Invitation” or “Burning House,” the viewer feels empowered — welcomed — to share in the personal revelation, “Aria… ” feels like a closed system, the artist’s eye looking too far inward. Even the doubling of image and name, the weak pun implicit in the painting’s lake and thepainterLake, cannot help us to understand the underpinnings of such a work. As Venturi wrote, “WhileLake’s canvases do not generally inflict a new language upon us, when they do, we have no guide to translate for us.” The controversial art critic Bibble has gone so far as to write, in reference to “Aria,” “[Lake’s] paintings are so many tombstones, so many little deaths — on canvases too big for the wall in their barely suppressed violence.”

Be this as it may, there are linked themes, linked resonances, between “Invitation,” “Through His Eyes,”

and “Aria… ”These are tenuous connections, even mysterious connections, but I cannot fail to make them.

Lakeappears in all three paintings — and only these three paintings. Only in the second painting, “Through His Eyes,” do the insect catcher and Bender appear together. The insect catcher does appear in “Invita tion” but not in “Aria… ” (where, admittedly, he would be a bizarre and unwelcome intrusion). Bender appears in “Aria” and is implied in “Through His Eyes,” but does not appear, implied or otherwise, in

“Invitation.” The question becomes: Does the insect catcher inhabit “Aria” unbeknownst to the casual observer — perhaps even in the frozen graveyard? And, more importantly, does the spirit of Voss Bender in some way haunt the canvas that is “Invitation to a Beheading”? —From Janice Shriek ’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

Afterwards,Lake stumbled out into the night. The fog had dissipated and the stars hung like pale wounds in the sky. He flung off his frog mask, retched in the gutter, and staggered to a brackish public fountain, where he washed his hands and arms to no avail: the blood would not come off. When he looked up from his frantic efforts, he found the mushroom dwellers had abandoned their battle with the pigs to watch him with wide, knowing