[41] Long buried memories of utopian dreams

Paul can sit down in a room with a book, or fall asleep on the couch, or fix a faucet drip, but not until after he’s back from somewhere. It’s as if the world – the thought of it – chews on him all day in the studio and he needs to go out and bite it back. While he’s locating his dinner plate for himself in the icebox – he never looks first in the same place each night – and boiling tea water for us – I don’t cook much – I go through his portfolio. This time of year, between the street lamps and the window lights and the fresh snow, there’s enough light for him, though the results have a dreamlike quality you don’t notice in his daylight work. He covers a half-dozen pages some nights: rough drawings, then one or two denser than that. When he’s most productive, he comes back with two or three more careful ones, like tonight, which tells me he knew what he had gone out to find.

Night is when the proletariat can hide from the powers even as it comes out – we’ll never really see them. Two kilometres to the north of us, across the river to the east of the Pleasure Park, there are rough streets and low buildings and times that are no one’s but theirs and where Paul goes to see them when they don’t see him. There’s a cinematheatre in that neighbourhood, and he must have frozen standing in front of it tonight long enough to make these. He would have been wearing his fingerless gloves – three identical views – because he didn’t stop working to sharpen his graphites. He’s worked on these in reverse, light for dark, but it’s a night scene from the way people stand without seeing one another and from the density of the air and the murkiness of the detail, which he would have drawn more clearly if he’d been able to see it. The sky, though – you know how dark and clear from the way he’s flecked it with stars, expanded the moon to twice size. When he draws streets, he has this way of hurling the perspective almost to earth’s edge in all directions, so that the shadows extend along with all the people who must be hiding in them. He draws a few faces on the edge of the page, from the memory he holds of them as they flicker past him, but when he draws the scene, it’s their backs you see. They’re under the string of lights that mark the entrance, the crowd forming a curling V towards the door so that they’re entering the mouth of a universe they will never escape but can’t stand back to understand. For example, they can’t see the Great Wheel, they’re jammed too close to the theatre wall, but he can – there, in the corner farthest from the low moon, so that it dominates the drawing like some kind of mechanical God for all the distance it is from their thoughts, tilted slightly towards the foreground, as if it was about to topple off the edge of a flat universe. This is my awareness, the drawing is telling him, and this is the wheel no one can see to understand.