Exhibit 2: Odilon Redon

by L.A. Leere

Primitive Man (1872)

He’s cowering in fear of the past, from which he’s just arrived. The postlapsarian gesture: contraction, enclosure, modesty, figure figged and flower hidden, inflorescence digesting the wasp. Hunched back, eyes upcast, mouth drawn up, anticipating childish tears, one toe twisted over the others, one wrist gripping the other, hidden from the sun. Spatialize prehistory, wash it in mist and sharks: mock our cliches. We’d like to imagine it that way, wouldn’t we? Our very own terra incognita, a rough patch thankfully escaped, lacking such amenities as language, or fire, or shame. So why the sheltering rock? Why the trembling lip, and the guilt? The image of man on the road from ape to God, so fresh and exciting in the Beagle’s wake, has an underdrawing. The Fall sneaks into Huxley’s progression. “Primitive man,” fresh from his autoexpulsion, remembers too late that space was only a metaphor. The signs are clear: No U-Turns.

Box at the Theater (n.d.)

Unfinished, oil paint on tan wove paper: no date determined. The demand for a date of origin is a demand for narrative. The demand for narrative is a demand for chronology. The demand for chronology is a demand for provenance. The demand for provenance is a demand for cash. Details serve to distinguish and to verify. They emerge from, rather than cause, conflicts over authentication and legitimacy. The fragmentary work, having no buyers, escapes history and lands in our lap untethered. We can slot it anywhere that strikes our fancy, or everywhere. Our metrics are neither stable nor verifiable. How much can you say about a picture? Challenge, not quiz. So, imagine early days: before the commissions and the shows, before the one-line mention from Apollinaire and the derision from Thiébault-Sisson. Redon has not yet learned from Poe and Baudelaire and cetera that reality needn’t cover truth. As he paints, his hand wises up, notices a method lying undiscovered between the brushstrokes, and makes for the exit, leaving its host firmly seated. Think about an unlocked door, or about oversteeped tea. Think about a phone call, cut rudely short.

Glory and Praise to You, Satan, in the Heights of Heaven, Where You Reigned, and in the Depths of Hell, Where, Vanquished, You Dream in Silence! (1890)

Redon is the prince of the dream: work unfolding on time’s line. From material (faces, stories, fears) to memory (names, goals, hallways), disassembling itself with gestures we can’t quite follow and coming together again, draped now in the fading suspicion that something’s been changed along the way. If the material is experience, then it’s past and only getting paster: no chance for recuperation by the time the work is done. If the picture is an illustration, though? Now we’re getting somewhere, or managing not to. Illustration points to text, which points right back to illustration, living out a remainder-free analytic fantasy: the precision of a caption, burning back the murky fens of latent content. The poem is the kindling for the charcoal, and the charcoal is the egg of the poem. And so on.

Finally: a clear overview! But the excitement of a dream fades in the telling, looks meager all laid out. Inevitable question: “That’s it?” Tepid protest: “Well, no, but...” So? Say it another way, and another. Insert yourself. Do a twirl! Sure, a potter's wheel can make the circle just—boring—but the same movement flings flaw into clay snake, thrashing blind. Or, think of it this way: a baby’s scream is different from a man’s, because only the latter scream replaces words.

It goes like this: There is a street, one you’ve seen before, doesn’t matter which. Around the corner, or maybe on the next street over, you hear an industrial roar, an empty churning, a colossal thresher tossing trees like chaff, a mower coming to trim the three-flats back to ranch. Nobody is around or missing. You run but don’t. The light coming over and through the buildings seems connected with the sound, though you can’t say why. Later, after you wake up, you will tell him about the dream. You tell him about the sensation of panicked flight, and the desperate turning, and the man on the porch who you did not warn, and the shining corners, and the tree roots ubiquitous not as objects but as the condition of footfalls (perpetual clamber), and the strange connection of your plight with the urgency you felt about reaching Walgreens before the end of pharmacy hours. In the telling you are struck by the resemblance of the man you passed to your former downstairs neighbor, thick arms and envelope glue and “hey, bud,” and then struck again by the lateness of this recognition, its suspicious convenience. Naturally, you don’t mention the sound.

Guardian Spirit of the Waters (1878)

This head echoes out, pure headiness troubled only by the bare suggestion of a body, or a wing. His eyes look past, behind and to our right. This is not an encounter, although it might be two. The giant does not see the boat. If his lips are parted in address, his audience is not the sailors, though they will surely hear. Ever start talking to a stranger at the party because you didn’t realize he was waving at his friend behind you? Jovian theophany from the Gallic perspective. The birds seem to clutter the waves.

Box at the Theater (n.d.)

Despite the oil paint, the museum put this one in the Prints and Drawings Room (appointment only but open to the public, the kind of thing you’d call a hidden gem if it was hidden, or more gemlike.) Thirteen months ago, almost to the day when I started this sentence, which was eighteen months ago. They had made the appointment, requested the pieces we saw, met me at the train station, bought me lunch. I took my notes. They had a lovely time, and told me so. I agreed: it was so productive.

The Marsh Flower, a Sad Human Head, plate 2 of 6 (1885)

—So great to see you! We were just chatting about the fundraiser, you remember, what with those uniforms I mean it was just a shame
—Oh I agree totally, I mean, really it’s misogyny when you get down to it, the football boys come whining and the district is all open smiles and wallets, but, and hey I mean they’re athletes too, really
—I agree completely, it's so important for parents to step up at times like this, I mean, really without moms who would be getting these things done?
—Right?
—Exactly! And I mean
—Well I should say, I mean, Dave might be a bit skittish what with how those garlic knots treated him, I mean, you remember the fall recital, right during the second movement
[Laughter, stifled and thus snorted.]
—Oh grow up I mean really, it's just, where was I
—Second movement?
—Right, yes, Dave’s history there, well that’s all besides the point because Fridays, Fridays are Dave’s bar night and I doubt he’d ditch the boys for another Pizza Ranch ordeal, but we’ll be there for
—We?
—Yes we, is something wrong?
—Well, I just thought with Jeremy
—Is there something strange about bringing my son to a school fundraiser, Kelly?
—No, of course, I
—So what is it? I mean, clearly you have something to say and I’m just curious what could
—I think what she means to say
—I’d rather hear it from her if you don’t mind, unless you’ve also got some thoughts you’d like to share?
—Well, I just, I mean, I don’t know if Brayden and Kelseigh are ready for, I mean exposing them so young, I mean it’s such a sensitive and chaotic age, I mean the bullying alone, it’s just, I mean, take the berries alone
—Bells
—What?
—They only look like berries at first glance, but they’re more like bells, and he’s been calling them bells, so
—Yes, bells, I’m sorry, my mistake, I’m just worried that Jeremy might
—You’re always so helpful, Jill. I appreciate the concern, I really do, but it's Jeremy’s decision, and I think I know perfectly well how to support him.
—Yes, of course, I’m sorry, I didn’t
—It’s fine.
—Thank you. Sorry. These days sometimes I just don’t
—So how about this new superintendent? Have you met him yet?
—No, but I think Kelly did, at that dinner wasn’t it, with the Beautification and Vagrant Self-Defense Committee
—Yes, just the other night, he was sitting next to me, very well-spoken, and I mean with that resume
—Of course, the resume is spotless, I mean I wouldn’t expect anything less, I sure wouldn’t expect what with these taxes, I mean it’s every year it's just
—And he loves the arts, and he wants to really build up the theater department, I mean make it something to be proud of
—Thank god, finally, you’d think this was a football team with some buildings attached, although no, no, of course I know how hard your son practices, I don’t mean to
—And really he just seemed so professional, I mean, a nice suit and everything, it’s just, I do worry, I mean I wouldn’t, and the resume is spotless of course, but I just wonder with this kind of community, I mean everyone knows each other you know,
—I was thinking the same thing, Kelly, I mean the awards are so impressive and he certainly checks all the boxes, but all the schools there are
—Exactly, it’s just, I don’t know if the challenges here will be like the ones he saw in that urban district
—But really, how am I going to do this?
—What? Do what?
—Fuck off, you know exactly what I mean. It’s the comments, it’s the way you people look scared when I mention my kid, it’s the advice, it’s the stares at Pizza Ranch, it’s the talk behind my back
—Oh, we would never
—and of course there’s talk, I mean really? Do you think I’m an idiot? Really? someone wears a loud pattern to Target and everyone in this fucking town hears about it after church and that’s everyone, including me until this started, when suddenly nobody was talking, of course nobody would ever talk about what poor sweet Jeremy is going through, I mean give me a fucking break
—Well naturally we’re concerned, I mean these days these kids are like a web, well I guess that’s why they call it, I mean like vines underground, like mushrooms, you and I can’t see where the real connections I mean there’s what we do see of course but that’s just fruit, I mean they’re so impressionable and first it’s one then the whole garden’s sporey
—and it’s the fucking advice! You all act like he’s failing geometry or sneaking around with his first girlfriend, do you know how much I wish he was sneaking around with his first girlfriend? Do you? I mean that I could deal with but
—Please
—leaves, Jill? Do you get that my son has leaves now? I mean first it was just the head, you know, and we thought well maybe it’ll stay there,
—nothing wrong with, I wasn’t trying to imply, I mean these days you say one thing and it used to be your words got twisted but these days they’re stamped, they’re stamped out into something that doesn’t look like your words at all, and now you’re responsible for it, the thing you didn’t even know you were saying but you were I mean it’s not like they’re lying you did say it but you didn’t think about what it would end up being, meaning, and now it’s yours and you try to throw it away but it sticks, it’s like barbs it gets in you, I mean burrs, I mean on you
—but then it starts drooping and glowing, and his eyes got that look, not quite empty, not quite plaintive, just looking up, always looking up even when you’re right in front of him, and it makes so angry sometimes, I just want to
—Susan!
—Oh, please, you’re both so damn perfect, huh, standing there acting shocked, acting like you’d be the warmest sweetest mother if your son was the one emerging like a stalk from shimmering waters that he himself has lit with the iridescence of his face
—It’s not easy for us either, you know, I mean Kyler
—Oh, is it hard? Is it hard, Kelly? Is Kyler framed against a shadowy background suggesting a kind of primeval mist? Is Kyler the second in a series of six charcoal homages to Goya?
—Well, no, of course, but I mean you shouldn’t think you see everything, you think it’s all right there for you like some kind of picture you think you can do what you like with what you see, just because you’re what’s seeing, maybe it’s undersees maybe it’s buried, maybe it’s been rubbed out ever think about that? Rubbing out against and against and it’s all night just to keep things in the lines
—Yeah that’s what I thought. That’s what I thought. I mean, Jesus Christ, there’s three more years of high school, what am I going to do? Three more years, Kelly! And if it wasn’t enough to deal with you and all your two-faced friends, I mean, you have no idea what it’s been like at home, it was like passing a fucking kidney stone getting Dave to engage before this so God knows what he’s been up to now, I don’t even know if him and Jeremy have talked about it,
—heard there are programs for
—and my god the arguments, we used to be so close, he’s always saying I act embarrassed, I act embarrassed when we’re out and I can’t tell him shit because you know what? I am! I feel like a fucking leper in TJ Maxx, Jill! Three more years, I mean then there’s college but you know I’m sure with a liberal
—and at first it was visible fruits from invisible trees, you know, that’s why they say undergirds that’s why they say proposed, you look at the accidents long enough and you figure out the structure and that made sense, now though now you might not even know there were fruits if you didn’t see trees first and it’s all gone, rotten, roots banyanish in air and it’s all so clear but that doesn’t help shit
—I mean, I can’t even think about college what with, with three more years, and extracurriculars? Clubs? Sports? He’s got leaves, Jill! He’s showing the definite influence of Daumier’s cartoons and symbolist poetry, Jill! And all you people can think about is your own perfect little backup linemen and C+ students, because that’s all you really want, right?
—seeing lapping saying now, can’t find the concept before it hits the ground, split lip juicing out all flystruck
—You want to be sure they’d never end up like Jeremy, right? I mean none of you give a shit about me or Jeremy or his goddamn bells, right? You just wish you could ignore us, right? But this, I mean this is my life now! Three more years, Jesus, I mean, what are we going to do about prom? What are we going to do about homecoming?
[Several seconds of silence.]
—What’s a Daumier cartoon?
—It’s something the doctor told me.
—Oh.
[Several seconds of silence.]

Profile of Shadow (c. 1895)

At first it looked like smoke. And this would fit: cities are an incandescence, light making smoke and smoke blocking light, burning up forests and rocks and bones. These days, of course, the brightest whitest cities have offshored their particulates, running now on intangible chains yoked to Shenzhen pea-soup, MK-84 dust, “dense white smoke and a garlic smell” burning, right down to bone. Yet such spatial inefficiencies can hold out only so long. Prisoners lose ground by inches protecting empty luxury homes, and the parks are charcoal thuribles. Which is why we went: down through the soyfields past: Manhattan, Illinois and past: Aroma Park, Illinois and past: Mahomet, Illinois and past: Rantoul, Illinois, which sprung up to serve Chanute Air Force Base (née Chanute Field, 1917-1993) and past: one of Chanute’s abandoned children, Lincoln’s ChalleNGe Academy, where “cadets are not court-ordered or placed in the program” because “it is a choice they make to change the direction of their lives” and past: the Minuteman ICBM they keep in their driveway for god knows why where we took a picture and past: the Paxton Inn, with penny slots in every room and past: a Family Video obelisk gone dark and past: the turbines, cyclopean red grid of lights blinking in mechanical unison and to: the Middle Fork River Forest Preserve, one of the “nocturnal environments” that have been “protected” for “public enjoyment” and thus recognized by DarkSky International (formerly the International Dark-Sky Association).

We mumbled the names of half-remembered constellations looking up, taking in. I said something trite about numerical and dynamic infinities, which I’ve since forgotten and likely failed to finish even then, given the placid obviousness of the view above, dense beyond measure despite the moon blotting half the sky and sticking in our eyes when we turned. She told me about her trip out west, how they set up camp in a valley with a lake, and how the mountains turned indistinct in starlight but cast a jagged border, and how the sound of the water surrounded them with unseen motion. The light came while she pitched the tent, blinding all at once from between the alpine teeth and freezing them somewhere between terror and curiosity. At first, maybe headlights? But what looked like growing closer was really growing larger, and brighter, until the shadows of the trees were stark and details resolved before them in a wash of orange-tinted light cast by a shining triangle, driven like a wedge between the peaks. She told me that what had really made them panic was the quiet, that something so bright shouldn’t come on so noiseless, and that as the light strengthened the unchanged sound of lapping water sounded more and more like a roar in the absence of the noise they expected. Our hands were cold when we pulled out onto the road. On the drive north, we said things like “look at the size of that Walgreens” and “the last time I ate at a Perkins, I had just been discharged.” In the city, “moonrise” can sound like a figure of speech.

But where is the light coming from? In the picture, I mean—the light that falls on everything but her face. If I’m right about the smoke, wouldn’t it be blocking that light? And why do these little would-be whorls and eddies, in the right mood and with the right zoom, look more like flowers? I’ve gotten ahead of myself again, forgotten that Redon wasn’t always a creature of the arcades. Before Paris, before the war, there were the fields and pines of the Médoc, overflowing vineyards butting up on half-drained marshes and sand-choked rivers. “Witches still exist there,” he would later say. And even further down, more removed, his own transatlantic origins: a murky affinity for the American and the “exotic,” dating (so he thought) to his own conception in New Orleans, child of a slaver father and a creole mother. The composition in Profile of Shadow appears mirrored ten years later in a portrait of Paul Gauguin, then again and again in sketches and drawings all called, generically, Creole Profile. The face is only ever half illegible (illegible only for us). Redon’s memoirs omit his mother’s race and mention his father’s profession only in passing. But he longs, without saying why, to have been born mid-voyage, among the Atlantic waves which he “often contemplated with pain and sadness from the high cliffs of Brittany, a place without a homeland over an abyss.”

Two years before Odilon’s gestational voyage, a young boy named Octave undertook its reverse, emigrating with his parents from France to Louisiana. He started with the Hudson River Railroad and moved east, making it to Peoria, Illinois, where in 1856 he joined the crowd to see Mr. S. M. Brooks, the great American Aeronaut, ascend in his Mammoth Balloon, the Hercules, a balloon much like those that Odilon had seen and transformed into eyes, or into his wife’s face. Octave soon rose from surveying to designing, spanning the Missouri with his Hannibal Bridge and planning Chicago’s Union Stock Yard, then the world’s largest execution complex. This rolling hecatomb was still processing ten million animals per year in 1934, when someone dropped a cigarette into dry hay. The fire, I’m told, could be seen from Indiana. While Odilon was mining poems and myths and visions to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible, Octave was applying the fruits of his railroad years to a strut-wire two-wing glider design, perhaps most famous for its use by the brothers who would soon realize the oldest dream on the winds of Kill Devil Hills. Around the Rotunda of our august Capitol, the Frieze of American History is divided into nineteen scenes, the last of which is titled The Birth of Aviation. It depicts five people: Leonardo da Vinci, Samuel Pierpont Langley, Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright, and Octave Chanute.

Box at the Theater (n.d.)

______

L.A. Leere is a writer living in Chicago. She edits fiction for Chicago Review. She is reachable at lou.a.leere@gmail.com for barter opportunities, field reports, gainful employment, and queening out. Exhibit is an ongoing project. Its first entry can be found here.

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