Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [126]
Drawings have an immediacy for me that paintings lack. You see the process, the artist’s mind at work. In the line itself, the play of the mind is revealed.
I stop before a Domenico Campagnola drawing of a man threatening a woman under a leafy poplar tree. His flying forelock, her upraised arm, her upraised knee, the struggle between them in the dark crosshatchings of brown pen and ink, might reek of murder or of rough seduction, depending upon your point of view. (Does your eye, for example, catch the glimpse of dagger beneath the summer’s tree? Does he wear no breeches, or has the artist’s line only economized?)
Forever and forever he is about to kill (or kiss) her. Forever and forever this struggling couple is arrested in the moment before male blade pierces female flesh. Love or murder? Mayhem or merging?
Having no answers to these questions, I walk away from the drawing and on to the next. Saint Catherine being beheaded interests me less, as do a paesaggio and a cartoon for a Last Supper. I wander past the sketchy Virgins with sketchy Children, the warm-ups for ceiling goddesses, the Abrahams sacrificing Isaacs, the old men, the knights, the Bacchuses—and I come to a Veronese nymph pursued through leafy woodland (with baby dragons underfoot) by a determined satyr (who looks, of course, exactly like my Renzo).
The dance of sex—pursuit, retreat—of nymph and satyr, faun and fauness, has been going on for thousands upon thousands of years. And I am hardly the first to want to capture it on paper. As long as flesh exists, someone will rise from the warmth of the huddle in the cave and struggle to her knees—or his—to scribble pictures—or words—on the wall of the cave, to please—or irk—the gods and goddesses. We go on revealing our hearts in the hope that they will never stop beating. Vain hope! As long as I live, I know I will hold the pen that limns this satyr, this nymph, this dark, bedragoned wood.
And here, limpid and relaxed after love, are a faun and fauness drawn by Tiepolo. He kisses the top of her human brow; she closes slanted eyes in ecstasy. Her hooves are as hairy as his, but she has human breasts and a human heart, and he is melted, for a moment, by The Land of Fuck. The artist has raised her right hand, then scribbled it out, as if not knowing whether or not to give her that power.
In my mind’s eye, I erase these scribblings. I take out my little notebook with the marbled paper cover and quickly draw my version of the Tiepolo scene. My fauness lingers as languidly as his, but the hand she raises wields a drawing pen. As she dreams against her faun’s rough, hairy shoulder, she translates this fleeting scene of lust, of love, for future eyes to see.
I will go home and do a nymph-and-satyr series. I will draw my way back to sanity. Neither the Trobriands with Julian nor Venice with Renzo is the answer. I have my answer.
I hold it in my hand.
afterword by Isadora Wing
I look back on my life, and all is confusion. My men, my child, my books, my flying lessons, my fears, my counterphobia, my fifteen minutes of fame. My search for serenity. In the middle of my life, I died and then was reborn.
At forty-five, you either perish or re-create yourself like a phoenix. I was chosen for the latter course.
What shall I do with this book I left behind, this husk of my old life, of the me I once was, and the other me I once was, heckling her? Is a novel a closed system—or does it open out into the world like a flower radiating fragrance, a flower that does not exist until somebody smells it?
Suppose you opened this book and a computer chip played Bessie Smith singing “Any Woman’s Blues”? Would it convince you of immortality? A novel is a strange loop. Novelist and protagonist constitute a sort of Möbius strip. Novel and reader another Möbius strip. The novelist writes because she foresees her own death. You (reader) read the book when she is dead and bring her back to life. As this book has brought me back to life. As your eyes and heart have brought me back to life (I almost