Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,49

new rods and cones?

So just like my breakfast of Mongolian ground nuts, my course in art appreciation was a means of restoring my sight. It’s a one-two punch, Langley said. Herbal restoratives from the inside and physical training from the outside. You have the material for rods and cones and you train your body to grow them from the fingers on up.

I knew better than to protest. Each morning I squinted my eyes into the morning light to see if things were any different. And each morning Langley waited for my report. It was always the same.

After a while I grew irritable. Langley counseled patience—It’ll take time, he said.

There was a week with children’s finger paints, those little tubs of dyed glop, which he had me smearing over sheets of paper to find out if I could learn to tell the color by touch. Of course I couldn’t. I felt degraded by the exercise. Another scheme had me going about the house and running my hands over paintings that I remembered from when I could still see: Horses on the bridle path in Central Park. A clipper ship at sea in a storm. My father’s portrait. That portrait of my mother’s great-aunt who had ridden a camel across the Sudan for no reason that anyone could determine. And so on. The worst part of this assignment was getting to the walls. Twice I tripped and fell. Langley had to move things, throw them out of the way. I knew each painting by its placement, but visualizing it by touch was another matter, I felt only brushstrokes and dust.

None of this made much sense to me. I was beginning to feel oppressed. Then one day Langley opened the door for a delivery of art supplies—canvases stretched on frames of various sizes, a big wooden easel, and boxes of oil paints and brushes. And now I was to play the piano while he painted what he heard. The theory was that his painting would be an act of translation. I was not to play pieces, I was to improvise and the resulting canvas would be the translation to the visual of what I had rendered in sound. Presumably, when the paint dried, in some synaptic flash of realization, I would see sound, or hear paint, and the rods and cones would begin to sprout and glow with life.

I considered the possibility that my brother was insane. I wished heartily that he would go back to his newspapers. I played my heart out. Never since I had first lost my sight had I felt so deprived, so incomplete as I felt now. The more he tried to improve things for me, the more aware I became of my disability. And so I played.

I should have known that, having taken up art on my behalf, Langley would devolve into an obsessive amateur artist with all thoughts of my reclamation put aside. What did I know if I didn’t know my brother? I had only to wait. He did not limit himself to oil paints for his compositions, but attached to the canvas any manner of things as the spirit moved him. Found objects he called them, and to find them he needed only to look around, our house being the source of the bird feathers, string, bolts of cloth, small toys, fragments of glass, scraps of wood, newspaper headlines, and everything else that inspired him. Presumably he was making the work as tactile as he could for my sake, but really because dimensionality pleased him. Breaking rules pleased him. Why after all did a painting have to be flat? He would plant a canvas in front of me and have me touch it. What is the subject, I would say and he would answer, There is no subject, this piece does not represent anything. It is itself and that’s enough.

How blessed were these days in which Langley had half forgotten why he had taken up painting. I would hear him at his easel, smoking and coughing, and I would smell the smoke of his cigarettes and his oil paints, and I would feel like myself again. Somehow those episodes in which he’d had me improvising on the piano had left me with an awakened sense of my possibilities as a composer, and so now I was improvising to forms—working up études, ballades, sonatinas and, being unable to write them down, fixing them in my memory. Langley in the other room understood what was going