Free The Big Why by Michael Winter

lighten up on me.
    Gerald loved to bicycle in the snow. I have seen him cross a street and from his arms a barking. Then a set of ears. He was a man who liked to rescue dogs.
    The problem with you, Kent. Is youre not swayed by the modern world. You like something, you do something. Your art, for instance. It is not really new art. It is not abstract. You dont like abstraction. And so you can’t follow it.
    What youre saying is, Gerald, an artist should follow the modern world, and whatever form it presents, the art should mirror it.
    That’s kind of what I’m saying.
    But I’m a realist, Gerald. I’m ashcan. I see the dirt and yet I see the spirit behind the dirt. I’m a good drawer. Forgive me, but I can draw a straight line.
    You went to a technical school.
    You have a problem with that.
    Let’s not get into it.
    I think it’s too late not to get into it.
    Okay, I want some cocks out of you. And filth. Youre no stranger. You speak of dirt, but there is no dirt in you. Give me snot. Give me a torn shirt. It’s all starry nights and bowsprits and men hanging like Jesus from the crow’s nest.
    Me: Youre talking woodcuts. You have to reduce the real to its strongest elements in a woodcut. You have to have things lit from behind. That makes them monumental. As though you were looking at a slide photograph.
    But the flaws are what are important. That’s what’s human. You draw gods.
    So we got into it.
    Art, I said, should be three things: full of sex, in a surrounding different from your own, and imbued with an unexpected intelligence. And there should be something unscripted in it.
    I’ll try anything once, Gerald said — he was ignoring me — I’ve even tried some things a second time. But you. You try only a few things, and you try them all the time.
    I’d met Gerald through his father, the painter Abbott Thayer. When you lose a father early, as I did, you look for fathers. Gerald Thayer was working on a book about his father’s theory of camouflage in animals. He wanted me to help illustrate it. I learned a lot about painting from Abbott Thayer, and not just technique, but reasons for painting. I lived with the Thayers for several winters. The extreme cold of their house that Abbott Thayer insisted upon — and we all had to sleep outdoors. Abbott Thayer believed temperature controlled the mind. Yes, he was a stoic, and his son, Gerald, while inheriting this stoicism, compensated for it with a lavish hand. Abbott Thayer led miserable hikes through the Adirondacks, and it was Gerald who packed the smoked salmon sandwiches, the Bordeaux, and the corkscrew. I can hear Gerald now: Leaving easy life behind, we turned the winter kind to us who faced its cruelty like men.
    I love to see principles, especially unorthodox ones, get handed down from father to son.
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    What was I thinking. Was I thinking. I spent all day chopping through four feet of ice. To get to a pile of slush, the slush you get when youre ice fishing. To retrieve some old wet birch. And haul an armload of the heavy wet wood up the hill and into the house to dry. It’ll take a week before you can burn it, Tom Dobie said. Sodden. The tiny house frozen and smoke from smouldering wet wood. It did not look good.
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    What is integrity anyway, except constancy in character. And what if maintaining a constancy is false. What if one assumes that the soul is not thoroughly unwavering. Why honour the man who does not change his opinion. Who does not alter his course. Who is methodical and predictable. Why praise the pattern. What if there is no accurate measure of a man’s behaviour. A few things: the pulse of the world is always shifting between poles. I have become attached to the ontological. I believe in atheism and the power of the ontological. The reason I do not believe in God is because I am happy with this world. I believe in slim books. I believe in the shape a boat cuts through ice. Sometimes we need God. Our hunches are not intuitive, or they