The Altruistic Cafe III

by panta rhei

Posted to Stories on 2001-12-13 12:17:00



They walk through the high station-like halls with Tiepolos, Tizians, and Tintorettos, with puttos, baby Jesuses and tumults of gods, passing painting after painting on cracked walls. The resounding of their steps is louder than the sound of the traffic outside the gallery.

“Look at this Caspar David Friedrich”, Hanna says, “The quiet brown landscape. The hazy horizon. Can’t you imagine just to walk into that picture? To become small and smaller….disappear in the haze of distance?”
As they walk on, she points out to other pictures.
“The praeraffaelitic Medea by Anselm Feuerbach”, she says. “And here… see those scenes by Max Slevogt…. like Schnitzler’s Drama’s…?” She walks faster, words pouring out of her like wine out of a bottle.
” Van Gogh’s self-portrait… his piercing eyes… and the green-and-green picture with the red poppy-dots – ‘Plains at Auvers’. And there’s Segantini, ‘The Bad Mothers’. See the wide plateau of snow, the dark blue shadow of the mountains, the peaks in the sun? Look at the tree in the snow, bowing in the wind. Can you see how cold the wind is? Can you feel it? And the woman with bare breasts… her hair caught in the branches… can you feel the pain on her scalp? The child she doesn’t hold is sucking on her breast… can you feel its little mouth?”
Hanna stands still now, her voice is slowing down.
“It is a subject of a buddhist legend. Child murderesses have to nurse their dead children while hovering over plains of snow… it is a picture that hurts, isn’t it. Look at it. Feel it. Go inside it. Enter the land of snow. Be the cold. Be the tree. Be the mother. Be the child. Feel the sadness. Cover your breasts with snow. Cover your eyes. Cover your heart. Bury it in the snow. Bury your heart. Bury your child. Can you feel it? The cold? The sadness? The loss? Be it. Be the sadness.
……..Now turn around. Remember you are still in that picture. Turn your back to the scene. Look out of the picture. Look at yourself standing in the museum. Look at me there beside you. Keep being a part of the picture. Keep being the picture. Tell me what you see.”
“I don’t know what you want”, Grace says with irritation. The sun coming through the skylight high above falls upon her hair and is swallowed immediately by its hard darkness.
Hanna suddenly looks tired.
“Oh…well. Yes, of course. I was just … wondering about how the way you look at things changes the things themselves”, she says. “I can only see things with my own eyes. You got another pair of them. The woman in the picture has eyes too, right? I am trying to change my view. The world is not real because it is dependent on our perception. Only what we feel does exist. The world isn’t made of matter. No real things. We’re surrounded by consciousness. Who’s that other will or spirit that causes the ideas that make up our material world? Who’s present in our consciousness, creating the variety of ideas and perceptions and emotions we are constantly exposed to? I am wondering which story I am in. Or which picture. My role, you know. Am I the acting person? The image? Am I the writer…the painter? The reader? Or the viewer? What changes if I change? What we call reality is an illusion. Therefore, nothing matters but story. I mean… I have no idea. I don’t know how to explain, because I myself am pretty unsure about it all. It’s what I want to find out.”
She turns around and starts walking out of the room.
“As all things are subject to change, you cannot believe a thing I tell you, you know. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”



The Literary Kicks message boards were active from 2001 to 2004.