Uncle Kev says, “At the end of December a white fog rolls into Venice that fades away the days and calendars from memory.” Uncle Kev’s dead but speaks to me all the time. We’re in Cornwall scooping out trilobites from the chalked cliffs. He’s trying to tell me something important. I can’t remember what. I wade through the moonlit water to the bottom of my tidemark’s sadness. I wake up in my room thinking about the portrait of the woman in Amsterdam. About her unbearable whiteness. About the line in the poem about her that says, “As long as she keeps pouring milk day after day from the pitcher to the bowl, the world hasn’t earned the world’s end.”
My room is painted white; psych ward white. Like snow and baby teeth and great whites and the long passage in the great book about the whale and polar bears and snowdrifts. On my cotton robe I’ve painted the exact spot in the wastes of Antarctica where the explorer Ernest Shackleton encountered the specter of the third man who’d guided him and his companion to safety during a blizzard.
He’d gotten lost in an infinity of white.
As I have.
*
In Japan white is the shade of mourning. In the hospital room where they’d put Uncle Kev after an episode, a chrysanthemum drooped in a vase on top of his nightstand. I dreamt of an albino tarantula. It sat on the vase’s lip guarding the moons on Uncle Kev’s fingernails. It measured time from his waxing and waning lunulas. Its heart was as black as Walpurgisnacht. It wanted to eat me. Pictures of Patagonian albatrosses and the fabled unicorns of Albion hung on the walls outside his room. Above them loomed an engraving of Goethe who thought colors originated from mixing black and white.
I dreamt I stepped on that tarantula.
A grey smudge stuck to the heel of my boot.
*
After Uncle Kev killed himself, I had this recurring nightmare: he’d invited me to climb a glacial rockface with him. I’d forgotten to take my crampons, pick, and rope. He never waited for me nor ever looked back. I tried to follow him but kept slipping down. I never reached the top. I never saw what he saw on the other side of the mountain.
He’d carved a message into the ice: Death is the mother of beauty.
I found out it’s a famous quote. Twenty years later in Amsterdam, I saw the painting of the woman pouring the pitcher of milk. She was more beautiful than she could ever have been while living. That was message Uncle Kev had wanted me to understand. I crept through the jute and hemp of the painting’s canvas into the artist’s studio. I shook off four-hundred-year-old dust from my clothes. I helped myself to the Venetian jug of claret standing between porcelain cups of eggshell tempura, oyster shells, and a dove cooing God’s promise the world would never be drowned again.
I was thirsty.
The woman was getting dressed in a corner, prepping for the painting. Her hand bobbed up through her shirt collar the same way Uncle Kev’s hand had shucked pre-Cambrian ocean life out of the limestone cliffs at Cornwall. I remembered what he’d wanted to say. He’d asked me, “Why did Hamlet lie about death being an undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns? Think about it, Hamlet had just been visited by the ghost of his father. Tell me, boy; why did he lie?”
I have no answer to that question. Only this:
Dear Uncle Kev,
If death is the mother of beauty, then violence and theft are the mother of art, which Hermes taught us when he stole and slaughtered one of Apollo’s sacred cows and strung its entrails over a tortoise shell to create the first lyre and music. So, if I could, I would swim back again through that painting and strangle the painter with a silk sash right before he put the final drop on it. Take his place on the stool and finish the piece. Claim it as mine. Then I’d carry the woman with the pitcher of milk up into a hayloft, strip off her clothes, go down on her and bottle God’s breath swirling out of the dust of her flesh. Smell the birth of the world in her navel, slip the sparrows chirping in her armpits into the back of my trousers, and catch the newborn stars falling out of her mouth all while squealing children below us play draughts and dray carts clip-clop over uneven cobblestones. I would do it just so I could come back and tell you, “I know her name, the colors she dreams in, the way she folds an apron over a chair, the cry of sunlight as she passes into shadows under a bridge.”
I would even do it to tell you about the hue of the frosted veils in her eyes as she thinks about how best to break it to me, “You couldn’t find the song winking on the river, nor see how the water was really the music, nor how dreams and poems float into each other like prayers pressed into the folded prows of paper boats by dreaming children, so no, you cannot stay, it’s early morning, it’s best you go, it’s time to milk the stars, it’s when they taste sweetest.”