Free Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, Steven Moore Page A

dropcloths in my studio, so as to contrive a dark corner in which I could make use of the projector.
    Generally I seemed to spend more time walking in and out of the darkness, than actually painting.
    To tell the truth, what I generally spent the greatest amount of time doing was sitting, whenever I painted.
    At times one can sit endlessly, before getting up to add a single brushstroke to a canvas.
    Leonardo was known to walk halfway across Milan to do that, with The Last Supper, even when anybody else would have believed it was finished.
    Which did not keep The Last Supper from beginning to deteriorate in Leonardo's own lifetime, however, because of a foolish experiment he had tried, with oil tempera on the plaster.
    In a manner of speaking, one could even say that The Last Supper was already deteriorating while it was still being painted.
    For some reason the thought of this has always saddened me.
    Often, too, I was surprised that so many people did not seem to know that The Last Supper was a painting of a Passover meal.
    I did not stop in Milan, in any case, on my way from Venice to Savona.
    For that matter I had hardly intended to stop at Savona.
    An embankment gave way. I have no idea how long the embankment had been deteriorating before I got there.
    Leonardo wrote in his notebooks backwards, from right to left, so that they had to be held up to a mirror to be read.
    In a manner of speaking, the image of Leonardo's notebooks would be more real than the notebooks themselves.
    Leonardo was also left-handed. And a vegetarian. And illegitimate.
    The slides that I took of my mother and father still exist, presumably.
    Presumably old slides of Simon still exist, too.
    I suspect there is something ironical in my knowing so many things about Leonardo and yet not knowing if the slides that I took of my mother and father, or any of my little boy, still exist.
    Or, if they exist, where.
    Time out of mind.
    I have snapshots of Simon, of course. For some time one of them was in a frame on the table beside my bed.
    But quite suddenly I do not feel like typing any more of this, for now.
    I have not been typing, for perhaps three hours.
    All I had anticipated doing, actually, was going to the spring for water. But after I had filled the pitcher I decided to take a walk into the town.
    The pitcher is actually a jar. On the way home I forgot about having left it, and so will have to go back out.
    This is hardly a chore. And there is a frisky breeze.
    In the town, I looked at the boats in the boat basin.
    While I was there I also realized that there is an explanationfor so many people forgetting that The Last Supper is a painting of a Passover meal, doubtless.
    The explanation being that what they really forget is that everybody in the painting is Jewish.
    For a long period, in the Borghese Gallery, I stood in front of a pediment carving of Cassandra being raped. Her hair is magnificently wild, for anonymous stone.
    Cassandra and Helen, both, had told the Trojans there were Greeks in the wooden horse. Nobody paid attention to either of them, naturally.
    Quite possibly I have not mentioned the boat basin before. There are several, nearby.
    Very few of the boats would appear to be seaworthy any longer.
    Though I rarely have any impulses in that regard any longer, either.
    Once, I sailed to Byzantium, however. By which I mean Istanbul.
    Though how I actually went, after the Bering Strait, was by various cars across Siberia. Next following the Volga River south, until I turned toward Troy.
    Constantinople thus becoming very little out of my way.
    Now and again I have regretted that I did not continue on across to Moscow and Leningrad, on the other hand. Especially having never been to the Hermitage.
    And to tell the truth I have never done any sailing at all, when one comes down to it.
    Every boat I have made use of has had an engine.
    This is scarcely including my rowboats, naturally.
    Which in either case I have rarely done more in than