The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [80]
The very first works in my oeuvre were mostly nonrepresentational and wildly expressionistic. I would create a picture that was a crazed scramble of red lines with an ugly muddy splotch right in the middle of it where young Bruno had experimented with scribbling all the different-colored markers on top of each other until the paper was wavy and warped with the dampness of so much ink, and then title the piece “Shoe.” Or I would jam a marker into the page like a jackhammer half a dozen times to make an exploding constellation of spattery green blots, then connect them with shaky blue lines, scribble over the whole thing with the orange marker and title it (intended only in affection) “Lydia.”
I would draw all day long, practicing constantly, flying through reams of sketch paper and many, many boxes of Magic Markers. I rapidly improved, refining both technique and concept. During this period of accelerated mental maturation, when I wasn’t either studying language with Lydia or watching my beloved Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street, I was drawing. Soon I also got the knack of representational form, and now I was drawing everything in the house: pictures of the furniture, studies of various rooms, pictures of birds and squirrels I saw in the backyard, pictures of my goose lamp drawn from different angles, self-portraits drawn from the mirror, portraits of Bert and Ernie I drew from studying their images on television, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of portraits of Lydia.
And she did nothing but foster and encourage my artistic pursuits, Gwen. She magnetized some of my best work to the refrigerator door, and Bruno was proud. She meticulously dated and cataloged the rest of it and filed them all away in a cabinet for future scientific analysis. After I’d mastered the media of marker and paper, she bought me a set of acrylics and brushes and converted my old room into my studio. I helped her whitewash the walls, install track lighting, and rip out the carpet so I didn’t have to fret over making a mess with my paints. But I demanded she leave both my goose lamp and the mobile of the solar system right where they were: I liked to look at them.
I say “my old room” because I was already sleeping with Lydia. No, God no, I don’t mean that euphemistically, Gwen. Not yet. I mean we literally slept together in the big cushy queen-size bed in her room. Why? Nightmares. My nightmares had never completely gone away. Plus sometimes Mr. Morgan’s parrots kept me awake at night, even though I knew their screams were benign. As for my nightmares: everyone has demons living inside them. Lydia had her recurrent headaches, and I had my nightmares. Lydia’s headaches I’ll speak of in a moment, for now I will speak of my nightmares. The Gnome Chompy was a recurrent figure in my nightmares. He would rob me of my voice and devour my parents in the jungle nearly every night. I was having more and more of these nightmares as I was learning language. Sometimes I still have them. Surely I’d had dreams before, but I only began to notice them after I started seriously acquiring language. Perhaps this is because the dreams of animals are not so very different from their waking lives. In both the dreaming and the waking consciousnesses of an animal, everything is immediate, everything happens all at once, everything is new and nothing is explainable. That is, of an animal that already has a consciousness, but not yet articulate language. I can assure you humans that when you dream, you are at your closest to the consciousness of a prelinguistic animal. That is why we feel that we must retroactively assign meanings to what