Salome and other Decadent Fantasies. Brian Stableford
until he began to remember. He never recovered all the memory, but in the fullness of time he remembered far more than enough, with the consequence that the enigmatic thought echoed down his straight bright days—and deeper still in his long and lonely nights—though he lived to be a hundred years and more.
O for a fiery gloom—and thee!
THE LAST WORSHIPPER OF PROTEUS
When I was a student in Leiden, some thirty years after the death of the city’s most famous son, Rembrandt van Rijn, I used to lodge in a third-storey room whose only window looked out over a dark and narrow canal. The canal had no towpath, being used solely to transport cargoes of linen and finished cloth in small rowing-boats, and its waters lapped against the foot of the rear wall of the house in which I lived. All the houses that bordered the waterway were cellarless and very tall, and because the canal was so lacking in width, the space between the buildings was always in shadow, always grim. My window let in hardly any light, even when the sun stood high and bright in a cloudless sky, but the gloomy shadows that dwelt beyond the pane seemed always to be restlessly astir.
The room next to my own was occupied by a man named Clement Folle, who told me the first time we met on the stairway that he was a painter. He struck me even then as the most curious person I had ever met, and I thought at first that his description of himself was mere vainglory, for I could not imagine what light he painted by, if his room were as dim and dismal as my own. Later, when we became better acquainted, I found that he had told me the truth, and was ashamed for doubting him.
I had always thought myself to be a desperately poor man, but Clement was even poorer than I was. He too had originally come to Leiden to be a student at William the Silent’s great university, but he had discovered—so he said—that he had no more vocation for orthodox scholarship than for holy orders. He told me even before he had cause to trust my discretion that, for one such as him, the world itself was the only subject fit for serious research, and that the wisdom of fable and legend seemed infinitely greater and finer to him than the stored-up heritage of the theologians and rhetoricians who taught in the ancient colleges. He took a risk in saying so, in the city which had become the heart of Protestant Holland, even though he knew that I deemed myself a tolerant man. He was probably past caring what others thought of him, and the heresy-hunters were far less active then than they had been in earlier and direr days.
Clement’s room had only a narrow wooden bed and an unsteady table for furniture. He had but a single wooden spoon and a single polished knife, and possessed no fork at all. The pitcher he used to fetch water was cracked and chipped, and so were the shallow bowl from which he ate and the cup from which he drank. He owned nothing of any value, save for his easel and his canvases, and his most precious possession seemed to be a curious but commercially worthless piece of dull stone, which he kept on the mantelshelf above his cold and empty fireplace. Whatever money came his way he infinitely preferred to spend on paint rather than food, and he bitterly resented the threat of starvation which frequently prevented him from exercising his preference. I never knew him other than ravenous, and was embarrassed by the eager way in which he devoured the crusts and pastries that I sometimes offered him.
I did not visit his room very often, and in the early days of our acquaintance he was reluctant to enter mine, but, poor as I was, I could still afford bundles of firewood to keep the winter cold at bay and set my kettle to the boil, so the simple instinct of survival encouraged him to make the most of my hospitality. For this reason, I rarely saw him actually engaged in painting, and caught only glimpses of the produce of his supposed artistry, but I often heard him talk, sometimes for hours on end, about his philosophy of life and the ancient wisdom which he believed to have been preserved in fables and legends.
Although I was rarely in his room, I do remember that his easel was always stationed close to the window. By that means, I supposed, he sought to make what use he might of the feeble daylight—for he was as parsimonious with candles as he was with comestibles—but the images he committed to his canvases bore not the slightest resemblance to the dull greyness without the window; they were full of the most extraordinary color.
I had never seen pigments of the particular kind that Clement used, and he explained to me that they had been devised for him by a cunning pharmacist.
“The colors are suspended in a lighter and less viscous oil than those which are commonly used,” he said. “Portraitists would consider such a medium worthless, because it would not allow them to hold a firm line, and all their fields of color would become blurred—but there are no clear edges in my representations, and the flux of the paint reflects the flux of the world, which I am not at pains to suppress. Other painters endeavor to freeze time and clarify the boundaries that separate entities, but my interest is in change rather than constancy. My own pigments permit greater accuracy in representing the mercurial play of light and color, and greater scope for the exercise of the visual imagination.”
The influence of these ideas upon his work was easy to see. His canvases depicted very fantastic scenes—if they could, in fact, be thought of as “scenes”—in which no shape was definite and everything did indeed seem to be in a constant state of flux. They were riotously bright, and it sometimes seemed to me when I stood before one of them, struggling to divine some sense or meaning in it, that I was looking through a magical window upon a world illuminated by a sun less gentle by far than the one that shines on our own quotidian earth. There was a sky of sorts in most of his paintings, and ground over which it arched, but the landscapes thus described were always blurred and hazy, and their horizons were always obscured by the strange creatures that cavorted in the foreground. These figures were never distinct, though they did not seem to be surrounded by cloud or mist, and were so intimately crowded together that it was difficult to say where one ended and another began.
At first, I thought that these creatures of Clement Folle’s extraordinary imagination might be birds, for there was something very bird-like about them. Peacock-feathered and eagle-eyed they seemed to be, but they were never entirely avian in form, often seeming to be cursed with a curious superfluity of wings, and sometimes having snakelike appendages or almost-human limbs. There were always entities of other kinds mingling with them, as though to accompany them in a madcap dance; their predominant hues were vivid scarlet, bright yellow and startling blue, and their contours somehow defied the logic of shape and perspective. Some seemed to have the texture of living flames; others reminded me a little of the stranger creatures of the sea whose likeness was preserved in some of the books which I was expected to study, but I could not imagine that Clement Folle had ever been a fisherman.
When my neighbor first showed me his paintings, I was quite tongue-tied, and for want of any honest or adequate response I muttered about their unusual nature. I dared not request explanations of their composition. When the painter had gained my confidence more fully, however, and I had become more curious about him, I began to ask him tentatively why he never portrayed more conventional subjects.
“No doubt I would be better paid,” he said, sorrowfully, “if I could paint portraits of stout burghers, and printers’ wives, and good Protestant cloth-merchants. A tolerable living can be made, I understand, by those who will condescend to devote their lives to the production of flattering images of the scornful sons and harridan wives of petty noblemen. Alas, I cannot be one of that company, for when I try to copy such images they appear on my canvas exactly as they appear to my eye: flat, false, and devoid of interest.”
Eventually, when I had become fond enough of him to want to understand him better, I plucked up the courage to ask him exactly what it was that he was trying to achieve in his painting. At first, though, he shied away from the question, and elected to discuss his aesthetic philosophy in such vague terms that it was difficult for me to discover the relevance of what he believed to what he actually did.
Once, when I knocked upon his door and entered without waiting for an invitation, I found him standing before one of his paintings—but he had set down his brush and his palette, and was holding to his forehead the piece of stone which he kept on the mantelshelf. His eyes were closed and his manner was rapt, and I had no doubt that he was in some way seeking inspiration from the stone.
When he opened his eyes to see who had disturbed him, he seemed at first to be alarmed