STEVEN GILL - COEXISTENCE

STEVEN GILL 

WOLFGANG TILLMANS

- installation

- cosmos of photo's

- explosive

 ESSAY BY ROSIE KANE

5.  Whilst every photograph involves a certain degree of abstraction from the three- dimensional fabric of the world, some images are clearly more abstract than others, and in different ways. Compare the use of abstraction by two photographers. Be sure to discuss the layers of meaning produced by the work as well as its formal properties.

The politics of emptiness: abstract photography, as abstract art, is independent of visual references and free from political noise.  An abstract image is a creation of the artist’s impression of the truth upon which the viewer can contemplate their own references; for its critics, it creates an emptiness and anxiety over a fear of the unknown and absence of political doctrine.

Just as an abstract painter takes the core elements of an image and redefines it as a collection of its essential shapes, so the abstract photographer eliminates many of the elements, which he or she believes to be external to the overall statement that they wish to make, and thus the politics of emptiness.  This reduction of effects and sensations delivers a freedom and changes the dynamics of the experience from reality to expression. This paper considers how two photographers found freedom through abstract photography, letting the ‘chemicals work to freeze that moment through their action’. 

Siskind, an American documentary photographer, became politically disengaged during World War II, and abandoned the idea that a photograph is a reflection of the world.  Wolfgang Tillmans’ abhorrence of American politics is reflected in his work for his first solo exhibition in America ‘Freedom from the Known’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, in which he said he was ‘extremely removed from literal political content… in a country whose politics fill me with a great deal of fear and anger’.  Tillmans’ goes on to discuss how working with the abstract provides a deeper but more indirect commentary on the politics he finds frustrating:

“There is a glaring dichotomy of working with pure abstraction, which is extremely removed from literal political content, and the personal sense of urgency that dominates much of my waking hours. Yet I feel the purely abstract works and non-direct political content photographs are my freedom of expression, my resistance to feeling completely dominated by the fall-out of a world bent on reviving ideologies.” Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans, born in 1968, is a German fine-art photographer. In 2000, Tillmans was the first photographer - and also the first non-English person - to be awarded the Tate Annual Turner Prize. His work came to international prominence during the 1990s when he moved to the London; he has since divided his time between London and Berlin. His diverse body of work is characterized by observation of his surroundings and an on-going investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ most basic leitmotif is to treat all pictures, including abstract ones, not as isolated phenomena but as always interrelated.  Tillmans is very much a generalist, with an encyclopedic array of subject matter, which can be seen in his works. Just looking at his sprawling installations [See: Image 1 - Museo del Banco de la Republica, Bogota, Columbia, Oct - Jan 2013] we are able to see this broad display of subject matter from still life, portraiture, landscape and beyond. But photography is in many ways only the beginning of Tillmans’ art. Indeed, over the last decade he has made an important body of abstract works that are ‘not made with camera’ (the artist’s phrase), yet are still directly related to the process of photography. In both a practical and philosophical sense, therefore, Tillmans engages and works with the photographic image on every conceivable level: as a consumer and reader of images, an editor of images, producer of images, as their printer, replicator, publisher, curator, installer, and also as their mechanic, anatomist, politician, sculptor, technician and connoisseur. Bracewell M, (2010). 'Everywhere, all the time and at once: the art of Wolfgang Tillmans' (In: Serpentine Gallery (ed), Wolfgang Tillmans. 1st ed. London: Koenig Books. pp.9-15). He is thus the creator and director of an extensive lexicon of images, examining every characteristic of their form, in both terms of medium and object. So to the question of what might be the meaning of abstraction for Tillman’s larger enterprise? What might Tillmans’ work mean for abstract art, one possible answer is: abstraction aids Tillman’s quest for generality, for a broadness of scope and vision.

We see this broad scope and vision in 2006 when Tillmans undertook his first exhibition for an American museum – MOMA. The exhibition was titled ‘Freedom from the Known’ and was unlike any he had done before as it focused primarily on the artist’s purely abstract photographs. It explored the presence abstraction has had within his figurative and representational work. Most of these works are camera-less pictures made by the direct manipulation of light on paper; to achieve them Tillmans manipulated huge sheets of chromogenic C print paper with light in the darkroom, rather than on a negative. Tillmans provides us with a selection of earlier photographs providing a context and passage-way from figurative to representation imagery to abstraction. (2006). Wolfgang Tillmans: Freedom from the Known. [ONLINE] Available at: http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/109. [Last Accessed 20.05.13]. One huge print entitled “It’s Only Love Give it Away” features crisp yet fluid lines suggestive of feathers swaying above soft purple hues or eyelashes, the picture conveys romance to me.

Tillmans large-scale abstractions, up to ten feet high, were presented in frames – a departure for an artist who pioneered a style of installation based on pinning and taping pictures directly to the wall. The elusive, transitory images in the abstraction, when framed can be seen as objects in space, displaying both buoyancy and weight. For Tillmans, photography has as many sculptural possibilities as it does representational, aesthetic or political. By using paperclips to hang them it highlights their bodily materiality and weight – thus appearing as visual events for the eyes to consume and as sculptural objects with a powerful physical appearance.

To me, one of the best things about Tillmans’ abstract pictures is that they are nearly impossible to talk about by themselves. In exhibitions they appear mingled with other photos in the branching sequences of his installations supported by the back and forth dialogue of perspectives. The abstractions help to generalize and broaden Tillmans overall artistic concerns of the capacity of his medium. Emphasized in the abstraction is the plasticity all of the works share, a compatibility that Tillmans brings out when reusing images in different formats and in shuffled situations. Is Tillmans asking us to step back, to find a new perspective on situations, or perhaps to find a freedom when tapping into the known and the unknown? I think Tillmans believes in the potentiality of the photographic image being intimately related between a level of understanding and awareness to the reality of being alive.

Many have argued that the defining preoccupation of modern art is mediating between the specific and the general. Tillmans has often been said to embody Charles Baudlaire’s ideal ‘painter of modern life’. ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,’ is how Baudelaire wrote out the ‘equation,’ ‘it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.’ Baudelaire C, (1964). The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. 1st ed. London: Phaidon Press. Tillmans has been recognised for his social documenting on gritty reality and providing essential facts, yet, will readily change his perspective on the perimeters for representational scenes by zooming in or out, locking subjects either too close or too far. Specifics begin dissolving into abstract formal arrangements.

The art of Tillmans is multi-allusive, so, it is of no coincidence that Tillman’s earliest works were made on a photocopier. Tillmans’ growing desire to engage with the photographic on every level is no different form the desire expressed by Andy Warhol only a few years earlier, when he said he wanted to a machine? Similarly to Tillmans, Warhol was a generalist who moved between the realms of art, commerce and subculture. Instead of photocopying, Warhol worked with screen-printing a developed a new use for photography. In many ways Warhol could be thought to represent Tillmans’ doppelganger, a dark counter-figure to the Baudelairian flaneur. Yet, according to Walter Benjamin’s famous description, isn’t capable of experiencing modernity on the same level as Tillmans’, he can only achieve modernitys standardised banalities – they don’t contain an unpredictable flux.

Looking back at the work of Aaron Siskind it is difficult to find a photographer who shifted the conceptual foundations of the medium of photography more than him.  Siskind, born in 1903, was an American documentary photographer who became politically disengaged during World War II, abandoning the idea that a photograph is a reflection of the world. Instead, he used the medium as modern artists used paint, as a malleable process that could be used to create entirely new things.

With a single glance at Siskind's photographs, it is easy to see his relationship with Abstract Expressionism. In his autobiography he describes when he received a camera as a wedding gift, and in a similar light to Tillmans, he quickly realized the artistic potential this offered. Siskind was close to several abstract painters and adopted a similar approach to symbol and form by isolating and thus ‘abstracting’ elements of visual reality. Energetic, gestural marks move across many of his images   [Image 3], just like the canvases of Franz Kline. But the similarities run deeper. Unlike any photographers before him, Siskind acknowledged the simple idea that the picture plane, like a canvas, is a flat rectangle. Accordingly, he sought out flat surfaces that he could photograph purely for the poetic implications of their details, using the elements of each image as a painter would use shapes. (Tranberg D (2009). Aaron Siskind: Abstract Expressionist Photographer. [ONLINE] Available at: http://voices.yahoo.com/aaron-siskind-abstract-expressionist-photographer-3893610.html. [Last Accessed 20.05.13].)        

In 1960, Siskind took part in an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York titled The Sense of Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, which staged the coming out party for abstract photography. The show contained work by a large number of artists, including the most prominent Americans, from Alfred Steiglitz to Ralph Eugene Meatyard fashioning images of subjects that could not be readily identified. Barbara Morgan described it as a photography that sought ‘common denominators’. She herself had moved towards an abstract photographic vocabulary, but meant that photography was a means of visual analogy, which doesn’t have to act a reality or instant, binding many phenomena together and establishing a relationship between the inner world of emotion and the outer world of materiality. (Rexer L, (2009). 'Stairways to Heaven'. In: e.g. Tolkien, J.R.R. (ed), The Edge of Vision: the rise of abstraction in photography. 1st ed. New York : Aperture. pp.99.)

By the time of The Sense of Abstraction two generations of American photographers put in place an ‘absolute tenet of faith’ that the meaning of the photograph was to be located in the photographer’s consciousness. Just before, during and after World War II, the United States took in refugees who transformed the culture of the country – an investigative spirit arrived amongst a number of photographers, whom sought to advocate innovation on every level: formal, technical and material – the effect being a host of the most experimental American artists including Aaron Siskind. His career is emblematic of this deeply American approach to image making, as well as its complex roots.

As a student of the Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design, Siskind held a membership in the Photo League, a group of left-leaning photo documentarists. Soon, the work became irrelevant to the group. In the words of the artist, “We came to see that the literal representation of a fact (or idea) can signify less than the fact of idea itself…, that a picture or a series of pictures must be informed which such things as order, rhythm, emphasis, etc, qualities which result from the perception and feeling of the photographer, and are not necessarily the property of subject.”

Siskind is often compared to Harry Callahan, also at the Institute of Design. Their differences are apparent as they spring from different sensibilities. Callahan, more a formalist led by the process of photography compares to the art-world of sophistication present in Siskind’s work. But, having worked so closely to one another, they both understood that one way to subvert the camera’s literalism – to intensify the image, was to press the formal composition for the image.

In some of his photographs, there is almost a literal analogy to painting; marks that appear to have been made with a paintbrush dominate, creating bold strokes across a surface. In others, Siskind obscured the context of recognizable forms (a weathered sheet of plywood, for instance) by focusing on the interaction of shapes, textures, and tones, and essentially ignoring the environment that surrounded them. In doing so, Siskind acted as a sort of found-object sculptor, harvesting from the world objects and surfaces that he reconfigured according to his own ideas. (Tranberg D (2009). Aaron Siskind: Abstract Expressionist Photographer. [ONLINE] Available at: http://voices.yahoo.com/aaron-siskind-abstract-expressionist-photographer-3893610.html. [Last Accessed 20.05.13].)           

In summary, perhaps the sense of the purpose of abstraction and the removal of all the unnecessary layers to reveal the skeleton behind the image is summed up by Siskind who stated:

"When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order-unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder''.

In abstraction, there is a counterpoint to today’s surplus of visual information.  It is a metaphorical paradigm for saying nothing but everything at the same time; it is not simple or an indulgence but a response to the world today.  For example, when Tillmans created his photographic images without the use of the actual camera, he was removing another manmade barrier.  Siskind’s approach was to photograph purely for the poetic implications of the details of the flat surfaces; he sought out using the elements of each image as a painter would use shapes.  Both artists were not seeking a literal representation of the image they saw but seeking the fundamental truth upon which others could imprint their own emotions.  As to whether this is elitist, the resultant images cut out those who prefer to have their experiences and emotions fed to them; but for those who have the freedom to explore their emotions, there is a wealth of excitement and a voyage of discovery in every abstract image created. 

There is, however, a journey that we embark on when looking at these pieces, a natural progression where Siskind uses the camera to capture elements of an image as a painter would shapes – just as the artists of the 1960s captured the immediacy of expression of an image by ‘one-take’ painting using buckets instead of brushes and employing a strict rule that no painting could be reworked.  Tillmans’ ink jet prints are an evolution from these 1960s paintings.  He used photocopiers to enlarge elements – size and quality – to create images with even photo sensitivity.  As such, Tillmans’ images create an impression of something caught in a camera flash – the immediate impression of the image it captured.

It is particularly interesting that both Tillmans and Siskind wanted their images to be free from political doctrine.  Under the Nazi regime in Germany, virtually all modern art was described as Degenerate art and was banned as was music that was not tonal.  The Nazis mounted an exhibition in Munich in 1937 called Degenerate Art which consisted of modernist artworks.  These were hung chaotically and accompanied by text labels which derided the art.  Perhaps this is reflected in the way in which Tillmans chose to display his art?  What is certain is that Tillmans and Siskind are perfect exponents of the fact that the essence of abstraction is freedom and all the rest is noise.

BRAINSTORMING

 The Circular Ruins RESPONSE 

Labyrinth definition

1. An intricate combination of paths or passages in which it is difficult to find one's way or to reach the exit. Synonyms: maze, network, web.

2. A maze of paths bordered by high hedges, as in a park or garden, for the amusement of those who search for a way out.

3. A complicated or tortuous arrangement, as of streets or buildings. Synonyms: warren, maze, jungle, snarl, tangle, knot.

4. Any confusingly intricate state of things or events; a bewildering complex: His papers were lost in an hellish bureaucratic labyrinth. After the death of her daughter, she wandered in a labyrinth of sorrow for what seemed like a decade. Synonyms: wilderness, jungle, forest; morass.

5. (Initial capital letter ) Classical Mythology . a vast maze built in Crete by Daedalus, at the command of King Minos, to house the Minotaur

CIRCLE OF LIFE – WE ARE ALL DOOMED TO BECOME OUR PARENTS – SPIRITUALITY – DREAMS – EDUCATION – THE SUPERNATURAL – IN SEARCH FOR THE ‘SELF’

The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of a man (later research taught me that he was a wizard) who arrives in a region of which he is a total stranger. He has journeyed from an unknown village not contaminated by modern Greek thoughts. Borges tells us that the man comes from one of the “infinitive villages that are upstream, on the violent flank of the mountain, where Zeud language is not contaminated by Greek and leprosy is infrequent.” The passage is filled with confusing descriptions of geographic contradiction and physical unlikelihood thus leading me to believe that the voyager has absolute belief in the supernatural.

Despite the complexity of the language Borges writes with, I was able to pick up on a large theme: the circle of life, dreams, education and the supernatural. It is a spiritual journey beginning with chaotic dreams and thoughts until they became dialectical.  It seems to me the man is guided by a higher force, a god or perhaps he himself is a wizard. “The goal that led him on was not impossible, though it was clearly supernatural: He wanted to dream a man. He wanted to dream him completely, in painstaking detail and impose him on reality”  - is it man quest to find god?

This man is on a mission, he appears unafraid of death but fears the local villagers In his sleep. This resounds with me, I am not afraid of dying yet there is always a fear of harm and vulnerability. The man has an obsession to clone himself and to not break the circle or the continuity. Reading between the lines seems to indicate that a method of cloning that was long and arduous may have been known to the wizard and his people, after several trials and errors he seemed to find the perfect formula. A cleansing in the rivers, worshipping the plantary gods and pronouncing the prescribed syllabled of a mighty name before falling asleep.

A lot of symbolism is used in this story to represent the cycle of life. For instance, the ruins are circular shaped. The sleep cycle is also part of the story, as the dreamer sleeps, awakens and sleeps some more. The temples are going through a cycle. . At times they are in ruins, and at others, they are revived by the latest generation of dreamers. All of these cycles are never- ending, just as the circle of life is never-ending. Borges keeps the story very tight with these symbols, and thus has created a tale that blatantly recapitulates and thus reinforces his theme.

Finally, the dreamer discovers that he is immune to fire, and thus must also be a “mere image” “dreamt by another”. There is no doubt the dreamers son will also go through these same experiences, as well as the generations after him. We are all doomed to become out parents.

TEXT + HIGHLIGHTED AREA'S / NEW WORD DEFINTIONS [below]

The Circular Ruins – JORGE LUIS BORGES

And if he left off dreaming about you ... ?

Through the Looking-Glass, VI

No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe as it sank into the sacred mud, and yet within days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn (reserved or uncommunicative in speech; saying little.) man had come there from the South, and that his homeland was one of those infinite villages that lie up-river, on the violent flank of the mountain, where the language of the Zend is uncontaminated by Greek and where leprosy is uncommon. But in fact the gray man had kissed the mud, scrambled up the steep bank (without pushing back, probably without even feeling, the sharp-leaved bulrushes that slashed his flesh), and dragged himself, faint and bloody, to the circular enclosure, crowned by the stone figure of a horse or tiger, which had once been the color of fire but was now the color of ashes. That ring was a temple devoured by an ancient holocaust;

now, the malarial  (contracted form of mala aria ‘bad air’. The term originally denoted the unwholesome atmosphere caused by the exhalations of marshes, to which the disease was formerly attributed) jungle had profaned it and its god went unhonored by mankind. The foreigner lay down at the foot of the pedestal.

He was awakened by the sun high in the sky. He examined his wounds and saw, without astonishment, that they had healed; he closed his pale eyes and slept, not out of any weakness of the flesh but out of willed determination. He knew that this temple was the place that his unconquerable plan called for; he knew that the unrelenting trees had not succeeded in strangling the ruins of another promising temple downriver—like this one, a temple to dead, incinerated (destroy by burning) gods; he knew that his immediate obligation was to sleep. About midnight he was awakened by the inconsolable cry of a bird. Prints of unshod feet, a few figs, and a jug of water told him that the men of the region had respectfully spied upon his sleep and that they sought his favor, or feared his magic. He felt the coldness of fear, and he sought out a tomblike niche in the crumbling wall, where he covered himself with unknown leaves.

The goal that led him on was not impossible, though it was clearly supernatural: He wanted to dream a man. He wanted to dream him completely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality. This magical objective had come to fill his entire soul; if someone had asked him his own name, or inquired into any feature of his life till then, he would not have been able to answer. The uninhabited and crumbling temple suited him, for it was a minimum of visible world; so did the proximity of the woodcutters, for they saw to his frugal needs. The rice and fruit of their tribute were nourishment enough for his body, which was consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming.

At first, his dreams were chaotic; a little later, they became dialectical. The foreigner dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater, which was somehow the ruined temple; clouds of taciturn students completely filled the terraces of seats. The faces of those farthest away hung at many centuries' distance and at a cosmic height, yet they were absolutely clear. The man lectured on anatomy, cosmography, magic; the faces listened earnestly, intently, and attempted to respond with understanding—as though they sensed the importance of that education that would redeem one of them from his state of hollow appearance and insert him into the real world. The man, both in sleep and when awake, pondered his phantasms' answers; he did not allow himself to be taken in by impostors, and he sensed in certain perplexities a growing intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of taking its place in the universe.

On the ninth or tenth night, he realized (with some bitterness) that nothing could be expected from those students who passively accepted his teachings, but only from those who might occasionally, in a reasonable way, venture an objection. The first—the accepting—though worthy of affection and a degree of sympathy, would never emerge as individuals; the latter— those who sometimes questioned—had a bit more préexistence. One afternoon (afternoons now paid their tribute to sleep as well; now the man was awake no more than two or three hours around daybreak) he dismissed the vast illusory classroom once and for all and retained but a single pupil—a taciturn, sallow-skinned young man, at times intractable, with sharp features that echoed those of the man that dreamed him. The pupil was not disconcerted for long by the elimination of his classmates; after only a few of the private classes, his progress amazed his teacher. Yet disaster would not be forestalled. One day the man emerged from sleep as though from a viscous desert, looked up at the hollow light of the evening (which for a moment he confused with the light of dawn), and realized that he had not dreamed. All that night and the next day, the unbearable lucidity of insomnia harried him, like a hawk. He went off to explore the jungle, hoping to tire himself; among the hemlocks he managed no more than a few intervals of feeble sleep, fleetingly veined with the most rudimentary of visions—useless to him. He reconvened his class, but no sooner had he spoken a few brief words of exhortation than the faces blurred, twisted, and faded away.

In his almost perpetual state of wakefulness, tears of anger burned the man's old eyes.

He understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake, even if he fathom all the enigmas of the higher and lower spheres— much more difficult than weaving a rope of sand or minting coins of the faceless wind. He understood that initial failure was inevitable. He swore to put behind him the vast hallucination that at first had drawn him off the track, and he sought another way to approach his task. Before he began, he devoted a month to recovering the strength his delirium had squandered. He abandoned all premeditation of dreaming, and almost instantly managed to sleep for a fair portion of the day. The few times he did dream during this period, he did not focus on his dreams; he would wait to take up his task again until the disk of the moon was whole. Then, that evening, he purified himself in the waters of the river, bowed down to the planetary gods, uttered those syllables of a powerful name that it is lawful to pronounce, and laid himself down to sleep. Almost immediately he dreamed a beating heart.

He dreamed the heart warm, active, secret— about the size of a closed fist, a garnet-colored (a precious stone consisting of a deep red vitreous silicate mineral) thing inside the dimness of a human body that was still faceless and sexless; he dreamed it, with painstaking love, for fourteen brilliant nights. Each night he perceived it with greater clarity, greater certainty. He did not touch it; he only witnessed it, observed it, corrected it, perhaps, with his eyes. He perceived it, he lived it, from many angles, many distances. On the fourteenth night, he stroked the pulmonary artery with his forefinger, and then the entire heart, inside and out. And his inspection made him proud. He deliberately did not sleep the next night; then he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and set about dreaming another of the major organs. Before the year was out he had reached the skeleton, the eyelids.

The countless hairs of the body were perhaps the most difficult task. The man had dreamed a fully fleshed man—a stripling—but this youth did not stand up or speak, nor could it open its eyes. Night after night, the man dreamed the youth asleep.

In the cosmogonies of the Gnostics, the demiurges (a being responsible for the creation of the universe)  knead up a red Adam who cannot manage to stand; as rude and inept and elementary as that Adam of dust was the Adam of dream wrought from the sorcerer's nights. One afternoon, the man almost destroyed his creation, but he could not bring himself to do it. (He'd have been better off if he had.) After making vows to all the deities of the earth and the river, he threw himself at the feet of the idol that was perhaps a tiger or perhaps a colt, and he begged for its untried aid. That evening, at sunset, the statue filled his dreams. In the dream it was alive, and trembling—yet it was not the dread-inspiring hybrid form of horse and tiger it had been. It was, instead, those two vehement (showing strong feeling; forceful, passionate, or intense) creatures plus bull, and rose, and tempest, too—and all that, simultaneously. The manifold god revealed to the man that its earthly name was Fire, and that in that circular temple (and others like it) men had made sacrifices and worshiped it, and that it would magically bring to life the phantasm the man had dreamed—so fully bring him to life that every creature, save Fire itself and the man who dreamed him, would take him for a man of flesh and blood. Fire ordered the dreamer to send the youth, once instructed in the rites, to that other ruined temple whose pyramids still stood downriver, so that a voice might glorify the god in that deserted place. In the dreaming man's dream, the dreamed man awoke.

The sorcerer carried out Fire's instructions. He consecrated a period of time (which in the end encompassed two full years) to revealing to the youth the arcana of the universe and the secrets of the cult of Fire. Deep inside, it grieved the man to separate himself from his creation. Under the pretext of pedagogical (relating to teaching necessity), he drew out the hours of sleep more every day. He also redid the right shoulder (which was perhaps defective). From time to time, he was disturbed by a sense that all this had happened before-----His days were, in general, happy;

when he closed his eyes, he would think Now I will be with my son. Or, less frequently, The son I have engendered is waiting for me, and he will not exist if I do not go to him.

Gradually, the man accustomed the youth to reality. Once he ordered him to set a flag on a distant mountaintop. The next day, the flag crackled on the summit. He attempted other, similar experiments—each more daring than the last. He saw with some bitterness that his son was ready— perhaps even impatient—to be born. That night he kissed him for the first time, then sent him off, through many leagues of impenetrable jungle, many leagues of swamp, to that other temple whose ruins bleached in the sun downstream. But first (so that the son would never know that he was a phantasm, so that he would believe himself to be a man like other men) the man infused in him a total lack of memory of his years of education.

The man's victory, and his peace, were dulled by the wearisome sameness of his days. In the twilight hours of dusk and dawn, he would prostrate himself before the stone figure, imagining perhaps that his unreal son performed identical rituals in other circular ruins, downstream. At night he did not dream, or dreamed the dreams that all men dream. His perceptions of the universe's sounds and shapes were somewhat pale: the absent son was nourished by those diminutions of his soul. His life's goal had been accomplished; the man lived on now in a sort of ecstasy. After a period of time (which some tellers of the story choose to compute in years, others in decades), two rowers woke the man at midnight. He could not see their faces, but they told him of a magical man in a temple in the North, a man who could walk on fire and not be burned.

The sorcerer suddenly remembered the god's words. He remembered that of all the creatures on the earth, Fire was the only one who knew that his son was a phantasm. That recollection, comforting at first, soon came to torment him. He feared that his son would meditate upon his unnatural privilege and somehow discover that he was a mere simulacrum. To be not a man, but the projection of another man's dream—

what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo! Every parent feels concern for the children he has procreated (or allowed to be procreated) in happiness or in mere confusion; it was only natural that the sorcerer should fear for the future of the son he had conceived organ by organ, feature by feature, through a thousand and one secret nights.

The end of his meditations came suddenly, but it had been foretold by certain signs: first (after a long drought), a distant cloud, as light as a bird, upon a mountaintop; then, toward the South, the sky the pinkish color of a leopard's gums; then the clouds of smoke that rusted the iron of the nights; then, at last, the panicked flight of the animals—for that which had occurred hundreds of years ago was being repeated now. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire were destroyed by fire. In the birdless dawn, the sorcerer watched the concentric holocaust close in upon the walls. For a moment he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he realized that death would be a crown upon his age and absolve him from his

labors. He walked into the tatters of flame, but they did not bite his flesh—they caressed him, bathed him without heat and without combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he realized that he, too, was but appearance, that another man was dreaming him.