I took gouache and sketching classes for a while when I was a kid, and the class I disliked most was always figure drawing. Part of that was simple enough: whatever natural talent for drawing children are supposed to have, I clearly failed to develop mine. But the bigger reason was that I once had an unpleasant clash with the teacher in class, and after that I never really liked drawing in the same way again.
I hated painting people. In gouache, that meant mixing red, yellow, and white into the right flesh tone, which already annoyed me before I even started painting. If the proportions were even slightly off, the result could no longer pass for the kind of skin color used to represent children who looked "healthy, cheerful, and full of promise." Since I could never get the ratios under control, I burned through red, yellow, and white paint faster than anyone else.
And in class, the exercise of mixing the most convincing flesh tone was itself a kind of competition. Everyone was implicitly judging whose color best captured that idealized look—the kind of child who seemed to radiate "study hard and improve every day" just by existing on paper.
I never won. When I succeeded, the people I painted still ended up looking as if they had fallen all the way into the uncanny valley, even by my own standards. When I failed, I could perhaps have defended the picture by claiming it was meant as a statement against racial discrimination based on skin color. But then there was the awkward question of how, while supposedly upholding an anti-racist principle, I was supposed to explain why the face in my painting looked flushed with fever rather than dark-skinned.
Sketching spared me the problem of color, but it introduced another one: the human body had to be broken down into structure and bone. That, too, felt difficult in a way I instinctively resisted. If I were capable of seeing directly into other people's skeletal framework, why would I need to rely on sharp, exact language to describe the falseness on their faces? Expressions are interesting because they leave room for interpretation. Reduce a person to underlying structure and some of that interest disappears. Unless, of course, sketching could somehow use outward appearance to reveal the truest part of what someone was inside.
Because I never liked drawing portraits, whenever we were given freedom in class I almost always chose landscapes. Even when the assignment was to paint a street, I refused to include people. The teacher criticized me for that. The theme that day was "the city." Other students approached it through busyness: crowds, movement, the rhythm of urban life. Those with more technical skill even used blurred foregrounds or the visual effect of motion to suggest the city's constant rush.
My city, by contrast, had no one in it at all. To make the emptiness visible, I had carefully painted every building in the thinnest brush I could find, covering them with creeping ivy.
"This isn't a city," the teacher told me. "You haven't shown what makes a city a city."
"I think it is a city," I said. "It's just a city after humanity has left it."
"If there are no people in it, then it's only a landscape painting. It isn't a painting with humanistic feeling."
"Does a painting need actual people in it to count as humanistic?"
"Why do you insist on understanding things differently from everyone else?"
If I had known the word for someone who argues for the sake of arguing back then, I might have wondered whether that was what I was. Now that I'm older—and much less thin-skinned—I don't see it that way. I still don't think I was wrong. A city without people is still, in one sense, a city. And the destruction or disappearance of humanism is itself a human question.
The city I imagined was not empty because of war or catastrophe. People had left it. Resources had run thin. Space had become too cramped. The tensions between people could no longer be resolved, so they moved on to somewhere better. What had once looked like a dying city was then taken over by nature and became another kind of metropolis: uninhabited by humans, but still governed by its own order.
No matter how I explained it, though, it made no difference. In that class, everyone else began with "people" and arrived at what was treated as the most basic, or at least the most correct, understanding of the city. Once that had been established as the rule, any other angle—including mine—automatically counted as a violation of correctness. If humanism was detached from the visible presence of humans, then the whole idea was dismissed as a false proposition. In painting, if a person was not made the subject of the image, then apparently it became impossible to express the shared, proper understanding of urban life.
It was not quite an argument, but after that class I acquired a label I mentioned elsewhere before: Are you mentally wrong somehow? Why do you always have to be different?
Maybe I simply didn't want whatever was "wrong" with me to be recognized too easily, so I lost my "talent" for drawing. What remained was redirected into writing instead—the habit of observing things, of describing scenes. Later, of course, people also learned how to see psychological problems in my writing.
I once had a beautiful dream about the end of the world. I call it beautiful because its scenery resembled that landscape painting I used to make.
I still remember it clearly. In a world saturated with golden sunlight, I walked into the square of a ruined city overrun with green life. There was a wishing fountain there, already thick with moss and flowers. I wanted to scoop up the coins from the water—coins stained with verdigris and rust—and read from them the hopes people had once entrusted to them, those lovely hopes that now felt like checks no one could ever cash. But the instant the coins touched my palm and left the water, they turned to mud and dripped back into the fountain, where they slowly congealed into coins again.
Meanwhile the sun grew hotter and hotter. It was no longer merely saturated in color; it had crossed every threshold available to it. Brightness, saturation, heat, radiation—everything exceeded its limit. In the dream I understood exactly what that meant. It meant final judgment was coming, and it also meant the dream itself was nearing its end.
I thought of the coins in the fountain. They could not survive once removed from the water; they still belonged to the old world, the one that had once belonged to humankind. So I hid in the basin myself. I took a breath, pulled my knees close, and submerged in the water whose coldness stood in total contrast to everything around it.
At last the sun reached its critical point, as though it were conducting one more reckoning with the last remnant of humanity in that world. When it dimmed again according to its cycle, I knew that round of judgment had ended. I tried to rise out of the water, but the moment I broke the surface, my vision blurred, melted, streamed away—then came darkness and silence. When I opened my eyes again, I was back beneath the water. I choked on a mouthful of foul, rusty water and instinctively leapt up again—only to blur, melt, stream away, and fall once more into darkness and silence.
Only later did I remember: this dream was originally meant to become a scene in Unpublished Dreams.