on with me because he went out and brought back a wire recording machine, and then, later, a couple of improved machines that recorded on tape, and so I was able to listen to myself and make changes, and think of new themes and record them before they got away from me, and I felt that neither of the Collyer brothers had ever been happier than at this time.
My brother’s canvases from those days are stacked against the walls, some of them in our father’s study, some in the front hall, some in the dining room with the Model T. Some he hung on the staircase wall leading to the second and third floors. I can still smell the oils even after all this time. The recordings I made are somewhere in the house, buried under God knows what. My venture into composing was a finite thing, as was his life as a painter, but it would still be interesting, were I able to look for those tapes, those spools of wire, just to hear what I had done. I envision unwound tapes lying entangled among everything else, besides which I would not know where to look for the machines to play them. And finally my hearing … my hearing is not what it used to be, as if this sense too has begun to retreat to the realm of my eyes. I am grateful to have this typewriter, and the reams of paper beside my chair, as the world has shuttered slowly closed, intending to leave me only my consciousness.
BUT NOW I WILL mention Langley’s last painting—the last one he did before he went back to his newspapers. It was inspired not by the astronauts’ first flight to the moon, but by their subsequent commutes. He had me touch it. I felt a sandy surface embedded with rocks and cratered with mounds of what seemed to be some sort of sanded epoxy glue. I wondered if he had reverted to representation, for I thought it felt much like the moon would feel if I bent down to touch it. But it was a huge canvas, the largest he had done, and as I moved my hand about, I found adhered to the surface some sort of stick, and as I moved my hand down along this stick it became thinner and suddenly veered into a right-angled chunk of metal. What is this, I said, it feels like a golf club. That’s what it is, Langley said. And then at other places on the canvas small books had been affixed by the spine and individual pages, stiff with glue, were sticking up as if blown by the wind—three or four of these in various sizes. Is there wind on the moon? I said. There is now, my brother said.
I thought the moon painting wasn’t very good—I had no trouble visualizing it, was the problem. Perhaps Langley realized it was a failure because that was the last one he did. Or maybe it was those moon walks of our astronauts that made Langley give up painting as insufficient to his rage. Can you imagine the crassness of it, hitting golf balls on the moon? he said. And that other one, reading the Bible to the universe as he circled around out there? The entire class of blasphemies is in those two acts, he said. The one stupidly irreverent, the other stupidly presumptuous.
For my part, I was awestruck, and I said to him, Langley, this is almost unimaginable, going to the moon, it is like some dream, it is astounding. I would forgive those astronauts whatever they did.
He wasn’t having any of it. I’ll tell you the good news about this space venture, Homer. The good news is that the earth is finished, or why would we be doing this? There is a great subliminal species perception that we are going to blow up the planet with our nuclear wars and must prepare to leave. The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency.
If that is the case, I said, what will happen to your eternal always up-to-date newspaper?
You’re right, he said, I must make room for a new category—technological achievement.
But technological achievements succeed one another—which one could stand for all?
Ah my brother, don’t you see? The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we’ve made. There will be none after that because