Inside the painter’s bathroom. He is showering, has been for a while. The room is filled with
steam and the rippling sound of water.
SHOWER DRAIN — I am both navel and mouth of a wet world that blurs. I leak, I gurgle, I fill and spit; water and hair and soap pass through me, down towards — what?
MOLD — We are all suspended in a cycle of soiling and purging.
CORNER — Look at him, painting his hands wrinkly by endlessly bathing.
SHOWER DRAIN — The cleaner the body, the more ragged the skin. Something eerie about that.
MOLD — Diluted longing, unquenchable thirst. A shower is no time nor place for decisive action; the wait might bring comfort, but forgetfulness too.
CORNER — His mirror’s gone foggy thousands of times.
MOLD — I am also fond of showers, their dampness and haziness. I rose before eyes came about, it was a long, visionless time. All around me, the warm, vast ocean, and I sat and spread over the sparse bits of dry land, a barren land. The landscape shared the same colours as his canvases, nausea green and scarlet hues. That was the world before eyes. But I don’t mean to get nostalgic.
CORNER — I reckon his paintings capture just that, the moment when vision crept in. The way his figures condense around the eyes, which are stuck like needles over blurred, moldy stains. Take those away: down the drain it all flows. They seem exhaled rather than painted; midway between fog and flesh.
SHOWER DRAIN — They look alike, don’t they? He and his figures. A quiet, ambiguous cohort; unwilling, or unable, to give away too much of themselves. That reminds me. I was once asked for a full list of holes in the human body. I said the usuals — mouths, ears, assholes, etc. — but forgot about the eyes: light enters the pupils, hits the retina, then disappears in the cranium’s depths. And out comes the gaze. I’ve been thinking about holes. Just trying to take a deeper look into things.
CORNER — Do holes have corners?
SHOWER DRAIN — Some do, I imagine.
CORNER — I’ve lived a cornered life.
MOLD — Tell me about it. The hot steam’s turning my thoughts moldy.
SHOWER DRAIN — Sometimes we say things and do not understand them… faced with the ungraspable, a gulf opens in the middle of the sentence.
CORNER — Yes. And then, words act like furniture in a room whose use we are not yet familiar with. You close the door behind yourself and tiptoe about, feeling your way against the walls. Coordinates amiss, you may eventually slide into a metaphor. Which, too, is a kind of corner: where two images oddly meet, conjuring new ideas from the void.
MOLD — Maybe that’s why his figures’ gazes are piercing and their mouths slightly agasp, silent, fish-like. Words stumble and fail; it’s from this black space — damp and dark — that their dumb faces arise.
CORNER — Like sticking shadows to bottomless backgrounds.
MOLD — Or staring at stains in search of some form.
SHOWER DRAIN — When will this shower end? The suspense is draining me.
