Illustration by Mel Wang
I will describe to you the life of the only real artist in my family, my uncle henry who is a failing financial advisor living mostly off of his parents’ money. he appears, age 16, in a local newspaper, the article commends him, henry dalton, for winning a state-level essay prize, beating out hundreds of contestants from all the high schools in new jersey. the subject of this essay so happens to be the field of study in which his father, bertrand dalton, esteemed princeton professor, specializes. bertrand, it was common knowledge in the dalton family and the subject of many merry jokes, would give great assistance in the academic projects of his sons. occasionally this assistance resembled complete authorship. henry later revealed to me that the reading he gave of his essay upon receiving his prize was the first time he had in fact seen the words which had won him so much praise. so swimming on the comfortable ocean of his father’s perjury did he sail into princeton university, legacy admit, where he did not put in the requisite effort to distinguish himself academically — i told you, a true artist — but did find himself in some situations which have since become famous within the family, such as when, in response to a professor’s reproof concerning the nonsensicality of a response henry had attempted in german, the language he was supposed to be learning in the class, henry replied, in english naturally, “what word did you not understand, sir.” so sailing his way through university did he meet and later marry one monica, vaguely european and very pretty, “speaking 5 languages, none of them well,” as my grandmother once put it. the marriage fell through for reasons unknown to me but due in part, i suspect, to a diversion in the path of henry’s merry ship: his keel was now kissed by the amber tongue of alcohol. anyways he recovered somewhat and soon settled down with a woman named susan, who would become the mother of his two daughters, my cousins mia and sabrina. i had never really heard anything about this woman susan but just recently saw some old family photographs with her in them, and i have not forgotten her face. in fact it has mysteriously and conspiratorially influenced the significant events of my life — women on the street — like all beautiful things do. what really struck me about it was that she looks exactly like my cousin mia, but with quieter eyes. i think if i had seen a woman resembling her on the street i would still think of that woman as much as i think of her now, but her face in my memory is inseparable from the medium it was in, an old photo: the stillness of it, so so sad, empty cities and wet sidewalks, etc etc…. anyways this marriage fell apart even more tumultuous than the last one, and for the same reason. henry now seemed to be drunk all the time. my mother recalls a dinner with the family wherein susan was asked What was the best part of your year and she said sabrina being born and DD said Surely the same for you henry and henry said: Oh no it was awful… blood everywhere…
And I will leave you with this image even though I have many more memories of this artist and I’m not even born yet in this telling, because it is the image that has most stuck with me and is the one I think about first when I think about Henry, and I think about him fondly. It is why I consider him to be a true artist, it is the exact expression of his particular way in the world, the space he carved out for himself. There are few things which require the singular worldview, a kind of courage but not the courage which is available to everyone but the one which is specific to each man, as that one must possess to say, about the birth of your daughter, “Oh no it was awful… blood everywhere.” In this statement are the many shades of abjection and excitement and cruelty and amphetamine-induced torture which have been the brightest lights of my life, the color red, red room, etc. I think of the movies Videodrome and Red Desert and blood… I think of lacerations, watermelon scar tissue scoop it into your mouth, Dead Ringers when the hot french one bites the tumor, Red Bull with the Tussin and the Benadryl and Delsym Days when you really are a genius, it’s not just the drugs…. I think of flesh and love and means and ends and what you follow with the word “OBVIOUSLY”…. the most insane improbable racist fascist misogynist things which you follow with the word “OBVIOUSLY.” the books a girl in Downtown NY reads on the job, her waitressing job, in the gazebo where the light is so bright and things are blue or green and not white the gazebo is not white it’s just over-exposed, like when a background in an old photograph is over-exposed so it looks like some greek coastal town, or when a face is overexposed so you can’t see the features and are simply left with a hallucination of sex, a hallucination in the absence of sex, the absence of the phallus, there is nothing to hold on to here, nothing to eat WHOLESALE, not cannibalism but anorexia, etc. mia like bulimia, promia and proana, im naming my two daughters that… of course i will have two daughters because i am implicitly what henry was explicitly, or i explicitly want to be what he was implicitly, and a transformation has thus occurred i am in love with a girls face i saw in an old photograph, her dark hair….
Blaise Dalton is a freshman at Columbia College. He plans to study comparative literature.