Buboni In Love, parts 878 - 881

878. Apparently, when I was seven I saw one of her films by accident . Perhaps it was showing along with one of the westerns I would go to see back then. I can remember that there were two feature films showing together, and because of the Jane Russell film I sat through both movies twice.

879. I soon forgot all about those movies, but several weeks later I had a vivid dream about Ms. Russell. I can’t remember any details of that dream except that we were in love and then she rejected me for someone else.

880. For many days, even weeks after that dream I was terribly depressed. It was exactly as if it had actually happened, as if it was my own real life experience. This so upset me that I actually began to argue with, and ridicule myself. “Albert,” I would say, in a tone of indignant reproach, “You’re only seven years old and she has got to be at least twenty. Besides you’ve never even met her, never ever really seen her.

 881. I mean you’ve seen her image but that’s just some dots of ink on some paper in a magazine. It would be one thing to fall in love with a movie star, very understandable to suffer the pangs of unrequited love in that situation. But to suffer from rejection? Well, this is just idiotic!” But I discovered at an early age that no amount of verbal logic or reasoning has any power over one’s emotional life. It just roars along under its own steam, and you just wait until it is over.

Buboni In Love, parts 874 - 877

874.  In desperation I resorted to rope. I tied several two-by-fours to the branches of the tree with the rope, and then, standing on a chair, I jumped upon them like mounting a startled horse by surprise. The various branches of the sumac tree all broke at once and everything ended up on the ground. I had murdered the sumac tree even though I had not meant it any harm. I was just like Lenny, in Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”.

875. My crime did not go unnoticed. My mother confronted me and asked, "Albert, why did you destroy the sumac tree?” I explained, “I was trying to build a tree fort.” “But why would you try to build a tree fort in a sumac tree?” This second question she said more to herself than to me and did not expect me to answer. To me, it sounded more like, “Albert, why are you such a stupid little boy?” I couldn’t even face her apron but stared down at my shoes, the laces I still had not learned to tie.

876. Late in the afternoon I occupied myself with throwing stones at the mortuary wall until, as luck would have it, I broke their only window. After that I went inside, told my mother about it and said I would be in my room until the police came to take me away.

877. Just a few years after my love affair with Cynthia I fell in love with Jane Russell.  This was a love both tragic, and confusing for me. It was especially confusing as I was a child at the time and I had absolutely no idea that I had fallen in love with her. It came about unconsciously, just like an illness with an incubation period.

Buboni In Love, parts 870 - 873

870. When I recall that dream I still can feel that delicious feeling of being in love with someone who I really do not yet know – set apart in some wild and strange place. We were like shipwrecked survivors on a deserted tropical island, for whom courtship, inquiry, fascination and consummation take place without the least possibility of interruption or competition and where even memory and fantasy are silent.

871. The very next morning I set about building a tree fort, with the restricted means of a five year old. Our backyard however presented a dismal prospect: a piece of dirt perhaps thirty feet square with a few strands of crab grass here and there. It was bordered with cinder block walls on three sides. One of these walls was the back part of a funeral parlor which had one window, its curtain always closed. Another wall was the back of an establishment that rented tuxedos.

 872. In the corner of this yard grew a lone sumac tree about seven feet tall with spindly branches and those long leaves that look like the remaining unkempt hair of some balding old man like myself.

873. I spent a long time trying to nail a two-by-four into a branch in that sumac tree but with no success. I remember being stupefied by the problem of how to hold the hammer, the nail and the wood up in the air all at once and still, be able to strike with the hammer. Each time I would try the nails would fly off into the dirt of the yard someplace and I would have to hunt around for them.

Buboni In Love, parts 866 - 869

866. Hearing the question he did not answer me directly, instead he look up at Aunt Jemima and said, "There has never been a time in my life that I have not been deeply in love.  It is, I suppose, part and parcel of an artistic temperament. Some of my earliest memories are of being in love, and of suffering over it beginning when I was five years old.

867. I was in love with a blond girl named Cynthia. Blond is the best description I can give you because I never saw her close up. She sat in a seat the farthest from me, diagonally across the room in kindergarten.

868. Once, at a great distance, I followed her home, but not all the way to her door. After getting several blocks away from my usual path home I began to feel a rising panic and gave it up, but I was only five.

869. That same night I had a vivid dream about my new love. I dreamt that we were married and that we lived in a tree fort in the back yard of my house. When I awoke it was with a distinctly absurd feeling of stupidity and I wondered to myself, “How could I think that people could be married and live in a tree fort?” I felt that the dream indicated a certain level of stupidity on my part. But the blissful feeling of contented marital bliss, as I now know it is called, would not leave me. 

Camus Crosses The Street, parts 862 - 865

862. Here was this argument again between the Duck and Buboni about aspects of art that I knew nothing about. Was it true that someone had actually paid 40 million dollars for an oil painting once? I hardly believed it but perhaps it was so. And if they had, how could you explain it in a way that an ordinary person like myself could make sense out of it. Ten thousand perhaps but 40 million? I thought it was just an example of Buboni's exaggerations.

863. But speaking of  Buboni, I continued to wonder if I was correct about his being attracted to Aunt Jemima and I watched for any indication that would confirm my suspicions.

864. You will remember all of the things we discovered about him when we looked him up on Google, about his academic history and the denouement of his career. We knew about his childhood and his color acuity and how he 'by accident' started to be interested in art history. But we knew nothing about the man's emotional life. Did he even have a wife, for instance? Was he divorced? 

865. Was he the victim of a torrid love affair, and was he suffering through those many many years that it takes one to get over a deep all consuming love? His ugly visage did not indicate that possibility, but one never knows. Wondering about him in this way I blurted out an inappropriate question. "Tell me Buboni?" I said "Have you ever been in love?"

Camus Crosses The Street, parts 858 - 861

 858. It was a big retrospective of the works of Cezanne. Cezanne, being one of the foremost pioneers of modern art, I expected big crowds and a long line to get in, but it was the usual thing, fifteen or twenty elderly couples with white hair in each of the rooms of the exhibit. 

859. I went to a baseball game, there were ten thousand people in the stands screaming so loud I had a ringing in my ears for a week, and my poor little Duck body was almost crushed to death in the rush to get into the stadium. People are interested in baseball, people and people are interested in cinema. People in general are not interested in art in any way. There behaviors make this abundantly clear. Art exhibits are social affairs where the rich go to visit with each other, they are not about art.

860. "Social affairs you think, Mr. Duck?", said Buboni. "Are you saying that all of the billions of dollars that have been spent on new museums for modern art in the world, and all of the trillions of dollars that has been spent by collectors driving up the prices of modern works to unprecedented levels are simply the expression of a social phenomena, to be studied not as a part of art history, but studied as a branch of sociology. 

861. "I am not going to get into that argument with you today said the Duck, and besides I know you have read Veblen's book 'The Theory Of The Leisure Class.' That book was written in 1899 but it is still the best and only explanation for why someone would pay 40 million dollars for an object consisting of a piece of cloth with paint smeared on one side of it, which is all that on oil painting is in actuality." 

Camus Crosses The Street, parts 854 - 857

854. But I did not find out the answer to that question because the Duck started to talk about the idea Buboni had just brought up. "Buboni says," he began, "that the artist is free to do what ever he would like to do in this day and age, and he has to bow and scrape to no Pope or Emperor. This is thought of as an advantage.

855. At this point in art history we often hear things like the artist is 'unfettered', he is encouraged to break the bonds of academic thinking and training and to 'experiment'. But is this really such a wonderful thing.

856. The truth is that the artist only has such complete freedom, because hardly anyone cares what the artist is doing. The artist's friends and relations all say wonderful things about everything the artist does, but it is really meaningless perfunctory encouragement out of politeness. The terrible truth is, most people just don't care what artists are doing.

857. You may chose to disagree with me, and you may point out that our museums are overflowing now with visitors, and there is more traffic to shows than ever before. But I see it differently. The last time I was in a museum was six months ago, before I became involved with Richard and Buboni.