Too bum tired to work on the Riemann hypothesis? Yeah, I’d worked on it all morning; got in a little over my head, but I’ll sort it out when I’m fresh, tomorrow, and I’ve got the stamina to make sense out of many different tangents—all circling this idea that prime frequencies and zero frequencies coordinating force the zeros to be on the critical line—an idea that, apparently, may not be entirely new; but maybe i’m getting ahead of myself; I needed to go about this carefully, which meant, well, I had time for Ursula, right here and right now. that’s good to hear. I thought so, too, although I don’t know what we had to talk about—so I considered, maybe we could work together to talk to someone else, like the next Mozart, or something. Right now he’s got those violins going a mile a minute; he’s full of youthful vigor—dying around the same time I finally got myself together and proved able to make all the art that I’ve made over the last ten years. I’ve been making up for lost time.
Now, you know what these people from the future were saying? They were looking at me spending about an hour and a half or two hours a day on my artworks, and by artworks I mean books, too, and they were joking around about me being so great because I only did “just that.” They made a big deal (through my television screen) of doing “just that.” And I was kind of at a crossroads, now, with my painting, where it seemed that doing less was doing more—that is, leaving things seemingly unfinished, of symbolizing a head or a figure with the least amount of effort possible. I didn’t know what else to do, since I was tired of working from a reference, reproducing something that was actually kind of boring—even if I managed to make it my own. It wasn’t always boring, of course; I’d done well for a time, but I’d done it so many times, now, that i felt compelled (as a master) to follow my impulses even if it meant doing two paintings a day, something that I can barely afford, and, lucky me, we just so happen to have storage space in the NC mountains, so conditions turned out right, for me, as if it was fate, as if I never could have been somebody else. Somebody that doesn’t paint.
I happened to be wondering at the moment—perhaps Ursula was asking me about it; i’m not sure why else i would be thinking about it, if it was true—what Francois Gilot said about my smoker friend’s wife, following them around wherever they went, making their lives difficult, all the time. I had to consider—Olga couldn’t follow them around all the time—not as much as Francois said, so I was a little suspicious of Francois, as if, perhaps, she could not be trusted to give an accurate account of her time with my smoker friend. She also seemed to exaggerate getting this man out of bed—as if, every morning, she had to spend vast amounts of time boosting him up, to motivate him. I just don’t think that happened every day. But one thing she did say, that i found interesting, was that Picasso did not live with Dora Maar—and, apparently, he slept in his own bed—something that I thought made him an ounce more likeable, in that he did not try to fool anyone into thinking that he wanted to divorce Olga and remarry.
But what did this have to do with Ursula? Why was she asking about this? She was curious, i guess, to see who I’d been talking to—even if, in getting to know them, I found them to be impressive—but not entirely so. Apparently this man spent a lot of time doing things besides art—no matter how much art he did. I also suspected Francois of exaggerating the truth by saying that her lover, this man, worked all afternoon with a break for dinner and then on to 2 in the morning. I’d seen his paintings, and I knew that, no matter what you might say about them, they didn’t take huge amounts of time—don’t believe what people tell you. So I had to wonder, a little, anyhow, how it was even possible for this man to spend so much time not making art—but, instead, lying out on the beach, or taking visitors, or talking up a storm, as, it seemed, was actually the truth.
How could he do it? How could he avoid the call, eating at him whenever he wasn’t working—when he could have been writing poetry, for example—loads of it, and, perhaps, loads more paintings—in spite of how prolific he was. It seemed to me that he was actually a little lazy—a trait that makes some of his painting interesting, because his laziness went over well with collectors; but he wasn’t the giant that I imagined I’d never surpass—something that seemed possible for me, at least in some respects, when it came to oil paintings output. Especially now that I was appropriating what these people from the future wanted from me—they wanted “just that.” Now, I always felt that the true path an artist must follow is a combination of what has done well over time and what you do without respect to what you may or may not think is going to sell. Don’t get me wrong, I was taking painting dead seriously, but, it seemed, part of doing what I really wanted to do—of saying what I really wanted to say in a way that I thought might go over well with others, involved a great deal of restraint—overcoming the tendency to work longer on a painting than the painting required out of practical concerns, for example, such as how much you can really afford and how much space you have to look after it.
This man was wealthy, and, therefore, there were no limits on what his output might or might not be—the sky was the limit, and yet, even still, he only did about 2000 oil paintings in the 91 years he graced us with his presence. But, again—what did Ursula want to know? I think she was wise—you don’t talk about throwing a no-hitter, no matter how impressed you were, or how praiseworthy, up to this point, the pitching was. Otherwise it could go to your head, and you’d jinx your chances of really doing something that would make you go down in history. i want to know how you do it—what do you mean by the call and, naturally, I didn’t mean the call to preach, but this was similar; I meant the hunger, the fire in the belly, the drive, the motivation, the discipline—everything that goes into doing something great, and, yeah, I also meant the downside—that being that sometimes it might’ve been nice to spend time with friends or to raise a family—something that, under the call, I couldn’t do—I’d be ransacked by intrusive thoughts.