Chapter Six
The days ticked by like the hands on one of the retrofitted clocks he’d nimbly finished, but passed more so like the immovable hands portrayed within his paintings.
Time seemed to stand still.
Recurring chest pains began to nag at him like a fishmonger’s wife shouting for more paper from the toilet. Food didn’t taste right. Alcohol didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right.
“I think I’m dying.” He said these words to the image that presented itself to him in the mirror that morning.
Nothing was going right at work.
He worried that he may indeed be out of time. He had not painted in weeks, but then he started again after he saw a really cool clock in an old movie.
His neighbor was spying on him from the eaves of her curtains, as per her usual, and he’d foregone his cockcrow Facebook viewings because he could not keep himself from screaming through the keyboard with his words. Then he remembered that it was an election year and he laughed.
That had to be it!
Everyone, as of late, had been duly posting their thoughts, if you could call them thoughts, on everything from who was to blame for breaking it to whom it was that could surely fix it.
Election years always made Peter vomit.
Over the passing days, he’d been trying new things to alleviate his anger and the frustration he felt towards the beings with which he found himself sharing the planet, but nothing seemed to work.
One day he would wish that a plague would simply wipe everyone out, then war the next. Peter didn’t own a gun, but he often wished everyone would just shoot one another and wipe the global slate clean. He imagined the Earth would do fairly well having less than five hundred human occupants.
One of the many problems with Peter, but this one would not become apparent for quite a while, was that he no longer took part in any of the normal, human social activities that most of us enjoy.
He did not go out, play sports, watch sports, meet up for coffee with others or partake in casual or vigorous bicycle riding. In fact, aside from going to work daily and to the market once a week, Peter never left the house, nor did he watch TV. All he did was paint clocks and build clocks, over and over again.
He was a downright clockaholic.
And it was starting to show.
One thing he did noticed though was the fact that, while painting his clocks, time seemed to fly by at unprecedented rates. Another thing he noticed was that in his present state he would sometimes mess up the numbers by painting them out of order. Such mistakes did not bode well for his mind.
Time consuming as his hobby was, and it was still a hobby as he was not getting paid for any of it, he soon found himself diving in even harder and deeper, thrusting away at his clockwork like a mighty saber-wielding fencer, sometimes staying up all night.
One evening he looked over his work, starting with the paintings he had done some years before. Some were created as far back as the previous decade, some even two decades before, back when he was happy.
Then he noticed something.
What he noticed was that the paintings he had done, although all quite magnificent in his eyes, and the differences he noted would appear more than palpable even to the common onlooker, he was sure, was that the ones he had accomplished during the most difficult of times - such as during the times when he and his wife were fighting, and the period during which he thought he might lose his job, and after his wife left him, then even worse; after he saw his elderly neighbor undressing and realized it was turning him on - were all better than the others.
It was the keenest of observations: During the worst moments of his life, his work had always improved.
He briefly played with this revelation as if it were a boogie on the end of his finger.
Why would stress, anger and misery improve upon one’s skill, he wondered?
He thought it preposterous.
Why were all the numbers, which beckoned longingly from the canvas, like the eyes of the Lady Hamilton as Circe, so well defined? And the subtle details of the arms of the clock and the other objects pictured in the frame so… what was the word he was looking for?
Perfect? Or does perfect sound too arrogant?
And what could possibly explain the other untold and innumerous differences he was seeing?
Surely anger and distress must be considered poison to the artist?
So how?
Mulling it all over, he decided upon a tall scotch and, shortly before pouring, decided upon two cubes of fresh ice. Peter never allowed ice to remain too long in the freezer. Why, he did not know.
His preference was neat, yet he sipped at the chilled scotch and harrumphed, as was his predilection, his way back into the living room where, now that Cheryl, his ex-wife, was no longer living with him, he found himself free to display his work upon every wall.
All told, there were 427 clocks in the house, both real clocks and paintings combined.
Salvador Dali painted images of clocks and no one ever thought he was a weirdo…
Wandering the house from room to room, he recalled with tenderness his penchant for painting tiny clocks, more often than not upon carefully chosen scraps of wood no larger than a matchbook.
Strangely enough, since Cheryl had taken the Kuerig, only two clocks in his home still functionally display the proper time. He thought it would be much too creepy to bear the impression of so many active clocks all telling time in just one place, so he stopped all the others long ago. For the time being, he felt that each clock being correct twice a day was satisfactory.
Turning back to the question, he pondered, “What is it all about? I paint images of clocks to remind people about the precious gift of time and yet no one appreciates them.”
He felt saddened.
“Their beauty is undeniable, and yet, how can it be that the very best of them were all created under duress?”
How can this be?
Peter’s sadness gave way to melancholy as he slowly paced the room, which was, by all means, a small gallery.
He then recalled the words of an author he’d once read while on vacation in Duluth. The writer had penned, on the inside of the jacket, of course, “Forget the ideal place to achieve your goals. When I write, I forgo the mahogany desk, the vase filled with cut flowers, the lovely window with a view and I find someplace nasty, noisy, smelly, if not altogether unforgiving, and once there, I sit and escape. My reasoning is that no true artist ever feels a need to escape a lovely view, and writing, by nature, is an escape.”
And why had that author written those words of advice and had it all been merely a coincidence that he had read them?
Then he also recalled that someone else had once said that there is no such thing as a coincidence, but he could not recall the direct quote.
There was plenty on his plate to consider, and since there is no better time than the present, he thought it best to dive right in.
What was the author trying to convey?
Was he saying that he does his best work when he is far from content with his surroundings? Was he saying that a person trying to write a book might spend too much time looking out the window before him or her, thereby wasting precious time? Was he saying that the flowers in the vase would be a distraction, or something more Jungian in the sense that the flowers would represent a reward for work that had not yet been completed and so stifle all motivation?
What was the author saying?
Peter doubted that any writer would, in his right mind, select a miserable location in which to pen a masterpiece, but then he began to think about his lair beneath the basement stairs.
Hadn’t he always worked in the bleak and empty spaces beneath the house, spaces somewhat reminiscent of a tomb? And if he’d always worked in the very same place, a place he felt was satisfactory, what would explain the differences in the paintings?
He then, in order to reassure himself, checked some of the dates which accompanied the signatures and confirmed a direct correlation. Sure enough, the worse off he’d been on each of the corresponding dates, the better the outcome. The product proved it so.
Peter then mulled over the idea that many couples will subconsciously cause fights within their relationship each time their minds recall the sex having been all the more stimulating after the last squabble. How one partner might sit and cry when, after starting an argument, the other, thinking they are quite mad, retreats to the bar or the garage or to the supermarket or shoe shopping in order to escape the madness.
How, he thought, that the formula must be doomed to fail if it is forced or contrived. One simply cannot fake a fight in order to enjoy make-up sex. It just doesn’t work that way. The success of the formula demands the emotions be real.
Could that be it?
Had Peter’s mind subconsciously noticed the subtle, and often blatant, differences in his work, and, paralleling the author’s need, had his mind too, sought out misery so that he might better paint?
Had he unknowingly sabotaged his life in order to create masterpieces of art in the same way some lovers do in order to experience vibrant and stimulating make-up sex?
Peter found himself intrigued.
Then he thought he would try something out. An experiment! If a person can start a fight on the false promise of replicating a desirable sexual experience, then perhaps, he imagined, he could try to generate some misery within himself and use that to his advantage in his studio!
Rapidly he thought of means and methods.
His itinerant conclusion was that in order to achieve the desired results, he would have to get into an argument or something and then return to his brushes and easel.
But with whom should he pick the fight?
Ah, but therein lies the rub, he thought. If he should pick a fight and the desired effect was not gained, he might just find himself sitting on the couch frustrated while all his talents ran off in bitter unison to the proverbial bar for a cold one.
What to do? What to do..?