I’m on the second bottle and the tablecloth is covered with notes. My head is extraordinarily light. I order cheese and grapes and pastry. Amazing what an appetite I have! And yet, somehow, it doesn’t seem to be going down my stomach; seems as if some one else were eating all this for me. Well, at least, I shall have to pay for it! That’s standing on solid ground… . I pay and off I go again on the wheel. Stop at a cafe for a black coffee. Can’t manage to get both feet on solid ground. Some one is dictating to me constantly-and with no regard for my health.
I tell you, the whole day passes this way. I’ve surrendered long ago. 0. K., I say to myself. If it’s ideas today, then it’s ideas. Princesse, a vos ordres. And I slave away, as though it were exactly what I wanted to do myself.
After dinner I am quite worn out. The ideas are still inundating me, but I am so exhausted that I can lie back now and let them play over me like an electric massage. Finally I am weak enough to be able to pick up a book and rest. It’s an old issue of a magazine. Here I will find peace. To my amazement the page falls open on these words: “Goethe and his Demon.” The pencil is in my hand again, the margin crammed with notes. It is midnight. I am exhilarated. The dictation has ceased. A free man again. I’m so damned happy that I’m wondering if I shouldn’t take a little spin before sitting down to write. The bike is in my room. It’s dirty. The bike, I mean. I get a rag and begin cleaning it. I clean every spoke, I oil it thoroughly, I polish the mudguards. She’s spick and span. I’ll go through the Bois de Boulogne….
As I’m washing my hands I suddenly get a gnawing pain in the stomach. I’m hungry, that’s what’s the matter. Well, now that the dictation has ceased I’m free to do as I like. I uncork a bottle, cut off a big chunk of bread, bite into a sausage. The sausage is full of garlic. Fine. In the Bois de Boulogne a garlic breath goes unnoticed. A little more wine. Another hunk of bread. This time it’s me who’s eating and no mistake about it. The other meals were wasted. The wine and the garlic mingle odorously. I’m belching a little.
I sit down for a moment to smoke a cigarette. There’s a pamphlet at my elbow, about three inches square. It’s called Art and Madness. The ride is off. It’s getting too late to write anyway. It’s coming over me that what I really want to do is to paint a picture. In 1927 or ‘8 I was on the way to becoming a painter. Now and then, in fits and starts, I do a water color. It comes over you like that: you f eel like a water color and you do one. In the insane asylum they paint their fool heads off. They paint the chairs, the walls, the tables, the bedsteads … an amazing productivity. If we rolled up our sleeves and went to work the way these idiots do what might we not accomplish in a lifetime!
The illustration in front of me, done by an inmate of Charenton, has a very fine quality about it. I see a boy and girl kneeling close together and in their hands they are holding a huge lock. Instead of a penis and vagina the artist has endowed them with keys, very big keys which interpenetrate. There is also a big key in the lock. They look happy and a little absent-minded. … On page 85 there is a landscape. It looks exactly like one of Hilaire Hiler’s paintings. In fact, it is better than any of Hiler’s. The only peculiar feature of it is that in the foreground there are three miniature men who are deformed. Not badly deformed either-they simply look as if they were too heavy for their legs. The rest of the canvas is so good that one would have to be squeamish indeed to be annoyed at this. Besides, is the world so perfect that there are not three men anywhere who are too heavy for their legs? It seems to me that the insane have a right to their vision as well as we.
I’m very eager to start in. Just the same, I’m at a loss for ideas. The dictation has ceased. I have half a mind to copy one of these illustrations. But then I’m a little ashamed of myself-to copy the work of a lunatic is the worst form of plagiarism.
Well, begin! That’s the thing. Begin with a horse! I have vaguely in mind the Etruscan horses I saw in the Louvre. (Note: in all the great periods of art the horse was very close to man!) I begin to draw. I begin naturally with the easiest part of the animal-the horse’s ass. A little opening for the tail which can be stuck in afterwards. Hardly have I begun to do the trunk when I notice at once that it is too elongated. Remember, you are drawing a horse-not a liverwurst! Vaguely, vaguely it seems to me that some of those Ionian horses I saw on the black vases had elongated trunks; and the legs began inside the body, delineated by a fine stenciled line which you could look at or not look at according to your anatomical instincts. With this in mind I decide on an Ionian horse. But now fresh difficulties ensue. It’s the legs. The shape of a horse’s leg is baffling when you have only your memory to rely on. I can recall only about as much as from the fetlock down, which is to say, the hoof. To put meat on the hoof is a delicate task, extremely delicate. And to make the legs join the body naturally, not as if they were stuck on with glue. My horse already has five legs: the easiest thing to do is to transform one of them into a phallus erectus. No sooner said than done. And now he’s standing just like a terra cotta figure of the sixth century B.C. The tail isn’t in yet, but I’ve left an opening just above the asshole. The tail can be put in any time. The main thing is to get him into action, to make him prance like. So I twist the front legs up. Part of him is in motion, the rest is standing stock still. With the proper kind of tail I could turn him into a fine kangaroo.
During the leg experiments the stomach has become dilapidated. I patch it up as best I can-until it looks like a hammock. Let it go at that. If it doesn’t look like a horse when I’m through I can always turn it into a hammock. (Weren’t there people sleeping in a horse’s stomach on one of the vases I saw?)
Nobody who has not examined the horse’s skull attentively can ever imagine how difficult it is to draw. To make it a skull and not a feedbag. To put the eyes in without making the horse laugh. To keep the expression horsey, and not let it grow human. At this point, I admit frankly, I am completely disgusted with my prowess. I have a mind to erase and begin all over again. But I detest the eraser. I would rather convert the horse into a dynamo or a grand piano than erase my work completely.
I close my eyes and try very calmly to picture a horse in my mind’s eye. I rub my hands over the mane and the shoulders and the flanks. Seems to me I remember very distinctly how a horse feels, especially that way he has of shuddering when a fly is bothering him. And that warm, squirmy feel of the veins. (In Chula Vista I used to currycomb the jackasses before going to the fields. Thinks I-if only I could make a jackass of him, that would be something!)
So I start all over again-with the mane this time. Now the mane of a horse is something entirely different from a pigtail, or the tresses of a mermaid. Chirico puts wonderful manes on his horses. And so does Valentine Prax. The mane is something, I tell you-it’s not just a marcel wave. It has to have the ocean in it, and a lot of mythology. What makes hair and teeth and fingernails does not make a horse’s mane. It’s something apart. … However, when I get into a predicament of this sort I know that I can extricate myself later when it comes time to apply the color. The drawing is simply the excuse for color. The color is the toccata: drawing belongs to the realm of idea. (Michelangelo was right in despising Da Vinci. Is there anything more ghastly, more sickishly ideational than the “Last Supper”? Is there anything more pretentious than the “Mona Lisa”?
As I say, a little color will put life into the mane. The stomach is still a little out of order, I see. Very well. Where it is convex I make it concave and vice versa. Now suddenly my horse is galloping, his nostrils are snorting fire. But with two eyes he looks still a bit silly, a bit too human. Ergo, rub out an eye. Fine. He’s
