Free The Quest of the Artist: A Sci-Fi novella by Phil Semler Page A

life without being alive himself.
    The artist and art exist as an unhealthy state of the spirit. Tony Kruger did not want Hands and Inka in their perfection as living creatures to fall to art like his unhappy world and enter a world other than vital and healthy, as much as given the circumstances. There can be no healthy society in which all men and women are artists , that would be a sanitarium in which even the doctors are sick.
    The artist expresses things healthy men cannot express, and that Kruger hoped they did not feel, but that nevertheless exist and are real in the society in which the artist lives.
    There are men who play at being artists, and then there are the helpless artists who, despite their desire for another, normal existence, cannot be other than who they are, can only be creative or sterile.
    Kruger the artist, then, lived and worked in the tension between the living and the dead, in the realm of impossibilities, communicating across the lines.
    Walking to the north county, he saw a few small animals. He drew them quickly. Something with hair.
    He noticed new growth, new plants, including ones with edible roots, which gatherers were eating.
    He saw buildings with high walls built around them. He suspected normals were doing some kind of work within them. He asked somebody about the building, and she said, they were growing petroleum.
    Kruger settled in a hostel in Petaluma where, he learned, there were to be visitors for a dance that night. As he watched the guests arrive, he suddenly saw Hands Hansen and Inka Holm pass through the room. He stood in the corner and spied them.
    The group began to dance—kicking and shaking and yelling—on the dance floor. He realized it was a kind of initiation dance into sex and procreation, just as it had always been, he thought.
    He wondered that more life seemed to be happening here than in the city.
    He joyfully contemplated all that time while observing—it was for them and those like them that he painted, and slyly peered around to see if they, too, were clapping together.
    At the dance he also saw a girl reminiscent of the actress Mary—who’d he’d once shunned, and he helped her up when she fell while dancing. She thanked him and he went back to his corner. He suddenly thought to himself that it was people like her who spoke the same language as him. She would appreciate his art.
    He was exhausted with jealousy for them, and worn out, even though he’d had no part in the evening’s dance. Just the same, just the same as it had always been, he thought. Always with burning cheeks he had stood in his dark corner and suffered for you, Hands, you blond, you living; and for you, Inka so brown and no-nonsense—you happy ones!
    Somebody must come now! Inka must have noticed he had gone, she must slip after him, lay her hand on his shoulder and say: “Do come back to us—don't be sad—I love you, Tony.” He listened behind him and waited in frantic suspense. But such things did not happen in this world.
    Yes, all was as it had been, and he too was happy, just as he had been. For his heart was alive. But between that past and this present what had happened to make him become that which he now was? Icy desolation, solitude—mind, and art, really.
    He lay down, with images racing in his mind. Two names he whispered into his cushion the few pure words from his youth, which meant for him his true way of love, of longing and happiness; that meant to him life and home, meant simple and heartfelt feeling.
    He looked back on the years that had passed. He thought of the dreamy adventures of the senses, nerves, and mind in which he had been involved; saw himself eaten up with art and introspection, ravaged and paralyzed by insight, half worn out by the fevers and frosts of creation, helpless and in anguish of conscience between two extremes, flung to and fro between austerity and lust.
    He wanted to tell Ivanova that artists like him can be nothing other than what they