Week ago today

Right now, this time last week, I was taking the dog for his last walk.  It was a good one – he seemed to know it was the last one, and we made it almost a mile.  The squirrels seemed to know he wasn’t a threat, though.

Since then, I’ve had more than my fair share of scotch, and even more than my fair share of gin.  I’ve lost a lot of water from tears.  I’ve explained what happened that afternoon so much that I can describe it now without breaking down, which I suppose is a sign of moving forward.  The bite on my chin, from when he clamped down on me when I tried to move his hips to give the vet access to the vein for the kill shot, is still scabbed over and it will definitely leave a few marks.  I can almost look at the pictures I took in the weeks before he died without breaking down.  Almost.

The son and his mom arrive tomorrow.  She had me talk to him today as they were waiting in the airport in Pittsburgh.  He was complaining about how he had to fly an Airbus, instead of a Boeing.  She wanted me to explain that the plane was just fine.  He knew that, but I’m a little proud of the fact that he has definite views about airplane manufacturers, and that he thinks Boeings are outstanding and Airbuses aren’t.  She thanked me for talking to him, and I didn’t bring up the fact that I encouraged him in his views.

The thing about having a pet is, it’s effectively a kind of enslavement.  I never really viewed the dog as a pet; he was a partner to me.  I didn’t try to smooth out his rough edges, didn’t try to discipline him into being a sort of stuffed robot companion – I wanted him to be himself.  But at the end the nature of the relationship was crystalized: I owned him, and I retained the option to kill him if it seemed like the best thing.  Killing any living being is never a good thing, even if maybe it is the best worst choice.  He was in pain, and in his pain, he was losing control of that part of him that could see people as good and kind, sources of incredibly delicious food and comfortable housing and keeping him away from the Hobbesian curse of being in the wild or subject to the dogs who ate his food and kept him starving before he was rescued and put up for adoption and found me.  But losing control isn’t the same thing as dying on one’s own terms.  He died on my terms.  And I failed him at the end in making that act not as comfortable as it could have been, forcing him into fear and terror, forcing him into being afraid of me, even after nine years of treats and indulgences and kindness.  I tried to be kind at the end but it was still a killing.  There’s no way around that.

He’s gone, though, and while I’m sad and empty, I’m also aware of the fact that I killed him.  In talking to people, I use the familiar euphemisms – “we put him to sleep,” “we put him down” – because that’s what we expect.  We’re trained to avoid raw meaning.  In an era of political evasions, and personal avoidance of responsibility, I think the best I can do is own up to the bluntness of non-Latinate language, to own up to the ugliness of early Anglo-Saxon Germanic associations with the blood and guts and awfulness of what it really is to take a life.  I don’t think it was an evil thing to do, or the wrong thing, but it was still a violent act.  The best I can do is admit to the violence, admit to my own acquiescence to violence so as to avoid a future violence, either on his part or on mine, which would have been more cruel.  But it still wasn’t pretty.  Killing never is.

I visited my friends outside Boston on Friday night, escaping the silent house and the absence of the dog.  Before I went to their house I spent a few hours at the Museum of Fine Arts.  I wanted to see the Sargents and the Copleys, wanted to walk through beauty for a few hours.  It was the right thing to do, because the dog was beautiful, and I wanted to be reminded of that.

I spent a lot of time with three paintings: The Daughters of Edward Darley Bolt, by John Singer Sargent; Paul Revere, the early one, by John Singleton Copley; and No. 1, by Mark Rothko (which was on loan).  But when I made it out to the suburbs to my friends, and we were talking over dinner, what struck me was that the setting of all the paintings was part of what made the experience meaningful.  I spend a lot of time in art museums, in nearly every city I visit, but American museums are somewhat different.  I love the National Gallery in London and the National Portrait Gallery just around the square, but each of those focus on painting – two dimensions, oil or acrylic or watercolor or pastel on whatever screen the artist uses – and you’re encouraged to look at how paint and surface intersect to create beauty.  You compare one painting to another, maybe broken up by some modern curator’s attempt to bring different media into play but essentially you’re looking at one form of beauty versus another of the same form.

Paul Revere is set next to a display of Revere’s silverware.  In fact, the teapot he holds in his hands in Copley’s portrait is in the display case next to it, only in the painting, Revere holds the unfinished work, still shiny from the mold and polishing, before the engraving work and detail work has been completed.  In the painting, the tools he will use to carve the engravings and make the lid into a kind of tiny pineapple are on the table in front of him.  The teapot itself is still raw, almost an art deco 1920s teapot with no adornment, something from the Bauhaus – but as he holds his chin in his hand, looking at Copley in the studio, you know his late 18th century sensibility is already thinking about how to take the clean (to our eyes, industrial and perfect) surface and make it something beautiful to his mind.  His eyes glint with the notion of making that perfect (anachronistically) modern object into a (historically) perfect teapot, with an intricate eagle design.  Copley, moreover, paints him against a velvety black background.  There’s no way his studio, or Revere’s workshop, or anywhere on earth could have that richly black-purple a background, but by giving him that, Copley makes Revere’s unwigged hair and deep-set eyes show the brilliance of a craftsman-cum-artist, someone who can create an object of use and make it an object of art.

Copley, of course, did not create an object of use.  He created a painting.  Something to go on a wall, something purely useful for being looked at.  That’s what the museums of London and Paris, largely, display.  But the great museums of America do something very different.  They show objects of pure art next to objects of use – also in the Revere room were masterfully crafted pieces of furniture, and of course the Revere silverware of tea sets, plates, cups, medals – and putting those objects of mixed art and use next to the objects of pure art made me think of the nature of beauty, of why we create it.  It struck me that I grew up going to museums – and I was a weird kid, I loved museums from early age, didn’t mind being dragged through the Smithsonian at age eight, the Metropolitan at age six, the Portland Museum of Art at age five – and part of what made me see beauty was that juxtaposition of art and use, seeing beauty not only in the non-functional but seeing that the useful could be beautiful as well because by seeing the non-functional and the functional side by side, you could recognize the beauty in each.

Sargent’s works are even more stunning; having first seen the Copleys, you recognized how much more perfect Sargent was as a painter.  Even his early work – the Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver was painted when he was 23 in Paris – shows a brilliance that makes the Parisian Impressionists look like paint-by-numbers children, even though his ability to show manufactured objects (trumpets, trombones) is limited at best.  But the ability to show movement while at once capturing a moment is unparalleled.  What makes the MFA’s showing of his works really sing, however, is that they show it with objects of use next to it – sideboards, fabrics, in the next room over Tiffany stained glass windows, collective plates and furniture – and you realize that this was a world (accessible in the late 19th century, admittedly, only to the 1% of the 1%) of real, actual, integrated beauty.  You understood as well how modernist design could take shape; how could you show a painting like Rehearsal or even more so like Daughters in a room which was filled with random tchotchkes?  No, you’d want to strip it bare, you’d want the room to contain only other perfect objects.  You’d strip the walls to white, let the geometry of parquet speak for itself, and you’d wait for the Eames to create their chairs and for Mies van der Rohe to create his sofas and ottomans to compliment it.  And you’d still get a fine Ottoman carpet, because those were perfect as well.  How could you show such a perfect object of non-functional art in a room with less than perfect functional objects?  And why aren’t those functional objects as deserving of the term of art?

They are – and that’s what American great museums seem to “get”, although I don’t think it was conscious when they were first built.  The next day I went to the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, whose collection was originally contributed by the fabulously wealthy China merchants of the north shore in the early 19th century.  To say the collection there is eclectic is to be kind; it was a kind of miscellany of interesting things donated by merchants who were bridging the East and the West back when the bridging was almost impossible.  Again, the collection is a mix of useful and non-useful objects, all (or most) of them spectacularly beautiful, but the curators do a wonderful job of putting them together, reminding us that art as non-use is not a fixed concept, as we consider it today (with Bill Viola video installations which can only be meaningfully seen in a gallery, where Ai Wei Wei and Jeff Koons pieces have no meaning outside of a public space).  They remind us that beauty to those merchants was something be lived with, to inhabit their spaces in the same way that they lived in them with their families, with their servants, with their dogs.

The last paintings I saw at the MFA were the Rothkos.  I’m rather attached to Rothko because I’m color blind; his blacks are deeply meaningful to me because I think I see them differently than most, I can see the contrasts and the painterly strokes and the emotion in them without being distracted by the fact that they are all black.  My color blindness makes me somewhat immune to the subtleties of the Impressionists (oddly, with the exception of the pointillists; Sunday in the Park at the Chicago Institute of Fine Art still leaves me teary-eyed).  But Rothko’s blacks draw me in.  On the wall notes, it suggested that you look, breathe, and see – but I didn’t need the instruction.  I looked, I breathed, I saw, I cried.  It was two days after I killed my dog and the blacks sucked me down into my own regret, my own guilt, my own culpability.

No. 1 is not, strictly speaking, a pure black; it’s got a red (I think – remember I’m color blind) box at the bottom, although the rest is a counterpoint of blacks.  I looked at the wall note; I hadn’t realized it was mixed media, paper on the canvas with acrylic and oils.  Close up, you saw brushwork of the acrylic underneath the oil, you saw where Rothko had gone mad with a coarse brush, painting what seemed at close examination to be people in a train, but when you pulled back you saw just the dark boxes and the differing tones of shadow, the red box underneath – imprecise at the edges – feeling like a kind of light.  I felt like he was painting an allegory, a train filled with empty souls trapped without destination but also without anything to stop them, the red light a kind of tail light showing them heading off, black into black night.  That caught me; I cried and cried and apologised to the dog and asked for a forgiveness which I knew I didn’t deserve and would never come.

Over dinner that night, we talked about museums.  We all were museum kids, and because we are all Americans, our ideas of museums are shaped by the MFA, the Art Institute, the Metropolitan, the Philadelphia.  Our vision of beauty easily merges the useful and the non-functional; the non-functional if anything is a bit less in the sense that it explores a kind of purity that doesn’t exist in the real world, but great functional art, great design, takes that idea of beautiful and makes it alive, brings it to our hands and our experience of living.  I wanted to go back to the National Gallery in London and test out the theory, test it out with the real gold standard, compare Copley’s inky black to the Caravaggios and the Rembrandts and their ability to make color something alive against their own light-absorbing darkness – or at least for me, the color of black, their backgrounds and their shadows and where they painted the absence or ambiguity of indirect light.

I went to sleep that night a bit on air.  It was humid and still but my friends had generously given me a room with a window air conditioner, so it was cool.  But the A/C unit hummed, and in the middle of the night, sleeping only so well as my mind continued to wrestle with the cost of being a dog killer, the compressor would kick on or off and I’d pop up, awake, and see the dog at the foot of the bed, his head also perking up to see what was going on.  Then the shadows of his black and gold fur would shift and fade, leaving only the carpeting or the blankets behind, the full moon’s light pale blue through the shades, nothing left to sit with me as I tried to find sleep again.