I was explaining why I had such a bug up my ass about Daniel Kane when I went on a tangential rant about the relationship of talent to success. Before I knew better I was questioning my own line of thought, not entirely uncommon, and then I abruptly ran out of gas and nodded off. My apologies for not conducting my train of thought to station. It was late at night, I was tired and working on one hell of a headache, and my glass of scotch was a desert past bone-dry. Worse still, I ran out of cigarettes and had to run down to the vending machine at this seaside resort to buy some. Gotta kick my nasty habits, but I have so many I'm not sure which one to tackle first. Kyoko was sitting on the veranda to our cottage when I got back, and we spent the next hour or so quietly watching the moonlight shimmer off the ocean. When I finally got to bed I didn’t go there to write. So allow me to finish my rant here, after bacon, eggs and coffee.
The more I think about it the more I’m convinced talent alone isn’t and has never been decisive. Too many instances come to mind where very gifted individuals have never seen the light of day and conversely, where individuals devoid of recognizable talent have become icons of their age. So, if talent wasn’t at the core of my dislike of Kane, what was? Maybe it was the cult of celebrity that Kane exploited and made so fashionable; the doting public and undiscerning ‘critics’ who lavished him with attention and praise. Maybe it was that he demanded we be complicit in his lie; not the lie about the alleged occult power of his paintings — more on that in a minute — but about the intrinsic value of his work as art. From where I sat Kane was all hype and no substance. Like Detective Thorn’s sobering realization that Soylent Green is people!, Kane passed off the hackneyed tripe he painted as USDA Grade A fillet. Some forget that he became a celebrity not on the quality of his work as an artist but on the strength of his being a media bad boy whose antics made good copy and colorful lead stories on the nightly news. Everyone was too busy making money off his antics and bullshit to worry that the emperor wore no clothes.
Ultimately, of course, if you call enough shit steak then sooner or later you devalue everything beef. Why go to the bother and expense of bringing anything genuine and authentic to market when people will buy the knock-off and pretend its real? The cut of meat isn’t important so long as people buy the sizzle. Kane’s propensity for theatrics and bad behavior made him ideal for exploitation by others even as he was exploiting them. His entire career was a pillage and burn sort of campaign that Sherman or Attila would be proud of; he went out of his way to achieve his ends at the expense of others, and I’ve already mentioned how much that pisses me off. Maybe we should say it was the price his celebrity exacted on those around him that offended me most about Kane, and why busting his ass became such a personal vendetta once he left me for road kill in his ascent to the top. I warned you I have an attitude and a long memory.
The rest is bullshit. I honestly never cared whether the rumors that his later paintings possessed occult properties of some kind were really true. Could Kane actually paint pictures that could somehow steal the essence of a living thing — its soul if you will, for want of a better term — and come to life, or was that, too, all smoke and mirrors?
Does anyone really give a fuck? The answer changes nothing.
That may explain why the guy who writes these stories left things somewhat obscure at the close of the tale. Oh, like other authors, he enjoys pulling the reader’s chain now and again and prefers to keep his future story options open, but more importantly he was making a statement that Kane’s mumbo-jumbo about the occult properties of his art was, like so much else concerning him, little more than the skillful misdirection of a stage magician. Neither one of us are about to reveal any tricks of the trade.
I’m a skeptic by nature and so the wrong person to ask whether Kane’s paintings can spring to life or not. Some of the evidence suggested he had actually managed to pull it off, but that’s more circumstantial than cold, hard fact, and as Nietzsche repeatedly cautioned us, there are no facts, there are only interpretations. I genuinely don’t care either way. You could argue that, if Kane could paint canvases that came to life that would be a supreme example of the transformative power of art, replete with the ability to transform others, but I won’t buy it. Kane’s twisted career wasn’t really about transforming others so much as victimizing them. Kane’s art, even in its most bizarre extreme, benefited only himself. If you’re trying to persuade me that changing a living person into a burned out shell was ‘transformation’ in the higher sense of my using the term then you haven’t been paying attention. That sounds like an argument a Neolithic shaman might make, like a hunter eating his prey to take possession of its qualities. I do know that Kane’s works took, they never gave; they mimicked but almost never truly created. The only thing Kane strove to transform and enhance was himself, and he used his talents to cloud genuine insight into him and his work so as to propagate a mystique about them instead. He deliberately obscured everything about himself and his art, and he sought to destroy what he couldn’t appropriate or distort.
It might sound odd, but to me what Kane’s paintings could or could not do has no bearing on what they intrinsically were. Not surprisingly, I remain somewhat conflicted and non-committal on the issue. Besides, let’s be honest. Why would you expect a clear and concise denouement to a story the author has taken considerable pain to paint in grayscale and shadow, and that has a central theme the reminder that nothing is ever what it seems? And why would you expect clarity, of all things, from me — a strung-out fictional character that lives — if you can call what I do actually living — in nebulous twilight, fending off the assaults of conflicting extremes and struggling to hold his shit together long enough to make some sense of it all?
I hate to break it to you, but if I took violent exception to carrying Kane’s luggage what makes you think I’ll carry yours? I don’t wear a redcap. You’re going to have to figure some of this shit out for yourself.
