yvestory
[from 4/25/17 Hard to Read]
And I am hungry as well, she says. Why is she always hungry?
Basely, the refrigerator is empty, and has been for a soft nine — that stretch numbingly longer than a week, but, through a trick of mercy, somehow less than two or three. Nine works for her, as it has for many, because of its consumptive fragility, drawn primarily from the shape of its Arabic glyph — asymmetrical and therefore malnourished, the tail dripping downwards emulating albumin spill — and situated twixt wholesome lemniscatial eight and the burly completion of the set, nine has always seemed to be a number of absence. A gap once filled, perhaps to be filled again, but presently windswept and hollow. One cannot think upon the number nine without an instant sensation of anemia. It is the perfect number to elicit pity from the sympathetic.
It’s now but two minutes away from half-past-five in the foreground of the waterfront café, and the divine Lucy, hungry as she is for both bruschetta and a twisted vein, finds salve in surprise agreement with a geriatric slumped on the adjacent table, his hunched back mirroring her own. His neck is an owl’s, and he is generous via defenselessness. In two shakes of a cat’s paw, Lucy bicycles back to her refrigerator with a loose stomach and a swept conscience and an dime-bag of trivia. As all martyrs, she’s much to learn.
When I was fifteen I would place belief in magic not through love of belief, but through the complacency of a dreamer. I had no affection for quotation marks. It was later that I realized I had been taken advantage of most predictably through this somnambulance, and blinking slowly was able to pirouette backwards and amend a word or so. I should like to think my contemporary dreams, when they arise, reflect this greater understanding.
So it follows;
What the airport booksellers invariably misunderstand in their focus is that Eduardo de Valfierno was a contractor, and quite rightly a visionary one at that: but Chaudron was leagues beyond the common portrayal of a simple synapse-relay in Valfierno’s design. Yves Chaudron was a true artist — one of the most technically skilled of his day, and although his worldly persona was metamorphosed into one most reviled in the days subsequent to his turn in the papers, this casting had nothing to do with his craftsmanship and everything to do with the caper to which he had been at the very least the most refined of accessories. And yet the act should not supersede the man. Unfairly bestowed with a somewhat goblinoid reputation cocktailed of picture-book anarchism and an alleged but naturally sourceless nausea for the production and reverence of art, one wonders if the mawkish Chaudron could have predicted how tightly the cruel grip of public opinion would seek to render him crumpled. It is certain that he was aware of the risks inherent to the operation; it is undercertain that these same risks were fully comprehended, for while he was by all accounts an intelligent man, he had the gauzed perception typical of all romantics. It follows that when much ado has been made on the inscrutability of his motives, it is his affections that have been heartily illuminated. Was this not the boy of five who wept daily when forced to turn from his canvas to the dinner-platter? Was this not the man who, in his withering years, without fail returned to a chance café encounter with Rodchenko as the most pleasurable moment of his life? Even as the stain of 1911 stubbornly refused to lift from the sheet of societal memory, Chaudron would continue to make the pilgrimage to the Louvre from his homestead outside Bonneval when his health permitted and wander the halls in eased contemplation, unrecognized in the ubiquity of his shabby form.
Few verifiable photographs of Yves Chaudron remain in circulation today. Possessing the dual fortune of an ambitious growl in his temples and a face as soft and unblushing as that of a homunculus, his successful escapades can be attributed to his steady innocuousness almost as much as they owe themselves to his singular talent. In social shots, he may be plucked from the crowd by process of elimination; if there are two or three unknown figures, he tends to be the least distinctive of the lot, marking himself through shadowed placement or median stare neither vicious nor vacant. Is this a fair labeling? It must be noted that no implication of an emotional vacancy is meant to be gathered from the above assessment. Certainly the photographic norms of the early 20th century situated themselves less comfortably with the art of capturing the candid, and Chaudron, though said to have reveled in lending expression to sentiment where permissible, was by all accounts in turn a man capable of holding his composure as context gifted necessity. “He is,” Valfierno noted with characteristic verbosity in a 1910 letter penned to his mistress, “a character of great passion, but far greater temperance, and greater still humility; his working finesse greater by far than all save the last, and takes but a meager serving of pride in his being, with but slightly more in his paint, though he found a great deal of joy in putting it to canvas, and more still reflecting on the canvases of others, and yet I have never save once perceived him to admire his own reflection in a looking-glass or the surface of a pool, and this instance seemed no more than a coincidence of passing!”
And yet, in his diaries, Chaudron repeatedly bestows upon himself a strange admiration targeted not at his skill as an artist, or for that matter, a con artist — to the frustration of innumerable scholars, the forgery is afforded less than three paragraphs over nearly twenty years worth of recovered recollection — nor does he praise with any abnormal reverence his day-to-day thoughts, his impulses, or his urges. Instead, what Chaudron exalts almost matter-of-factly with an impassion vague, is “l’unicité divine” — or “specialness”, as the trilingual Chaudron crudely approximates in occasional English entries. This “specialness”, never explicitly defined, does not afford him a place within the paramount ranks of humanity; it places him above and apart, an honor reserved for him alone. Yves Chaudron, according to Yves Chaudron, is different from his peers in a sense almost intangible, an aura writhing with both displacement and entitlement that he marvels upon without dissection. “I am a dandelion amongst the knapweed,” he seems to have scrawled offhandedly on the side of his writing desk. It is a shame he did not elaborate. Of course we must assume meaning, but there are limits to how much soul can be drawn out from a line of this sort with such faint context.
And of the other, notably graphic, example of household graffiti in his study? It is not such a stretch of the mind to assume that we are to take the message there at face value, as at least two fictionalized portrayals of Chaudron have done within the last decade. While it does make for a grotesquely dramatic image, his mysterious ailments work to allow a window of possibility. When he died in 1927, it is suspected that the perseverance of a brain tumor was to blame, and while admittedly a highly uncommon side effect, such conditions have been known to cause haemolacria from time to time. There are certainly selections of his diaries, as well as the diaries and correspondence of close friends and acquaintances that have been presented as proof for the affirmative; these same texts (in many cases, even the same passages) have been interpreted as ammunition for the opposition. It should go without saying that it is the fate of such matters to remain perpetually inconclusive. Because of his current state of being, capturing the unadulterated truth of Yves Chaudron’s eyes — which may or may not have been a piercing amber — seems close to impossible. Just as obvious is the perfectly verifiable truth that for the legions of Chaudron scholars, devotees, and malanderers alike, this near impossibility will never be a reason to cease trying.
“Longevity is my most terrific virtue and Longevity is my most terrible sin,” Chaudron once said, or may have said, or,
“Longevity is my most charming persona-facet, as it is a faucet of wretchedness, my first signifier and my hated conclusion.”
I cannot imagine his passing without a final brew of chamomile and lotus, a sprig of mint, a sprinkling of tangerine. Breathing in. I cannot imagine he spoke as I did. Not vividly.
I imagine his thoughts slipped parallel. Perhaps he enjoyed his solitary cup of tea. Perhaps not. Breathing out. The comfort of the deceased has always seemed to be — to me — well —
All the same, I’m genuine glintless when I mutter to myself, “Best Wishes.” All the same.
Yes, but now the lights are on. I can’t help it. Hear in my eye: “Best Wishes, Yves Chaudron.”
Still, there is little time for him. At age fifteen, I exist tangentially, vis-à-vis with dusted reflections; marketplace panes in low synth-auroral lighting, the daily late to the county busline, wait for the next bihourly, late to the state hub, late to the coughing lecture and the tradeoff point and the lunch date and my first day of work and counting. The transitional hours feed me a small dose of security. Even the daintiest machines here are muscular. Like Chaudron, I am ill, I am sick; opaquely bestowed with no small handful of ailments, more tactile than not. Perhaps he premirrors me in this calamine state of mind. I am chilled and enthusiastic.
My enthusiasm dissipates upon my sixteenth birthday. Without the passing platter, subficial momentum ceases. Railways are relays, but these are the thoughts of pit vipers aching for sustenance. That they and I would take a profound interest in the metropolitan is to be expected - the scuffing of shoes on asphalt is frictious; microsparks are incubated and birthed in milliseconds. Individually these triggers of energy possess the wavering strength of a daydream, but Seattle is home to over half a million shufflers; meanwhile, Twin Cities possess more than three million, et cetera, et cetera, on and upwards. The yawning vision is unconsciously realized through this vibrating consensus of movement. Here is a spiral an empire of turbines could never match. Tireless in their thermal incubation and dispersal, the dreamers project outwards a vesuvial spotlight, and with infrared pockets throbbing, the crotalines dart in to feed.
Hear: I, myself, am, believably, not so hungry after all.