NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
The seventeen-year cicadas are singing outside and their growing volume fades as the door closes. Daisy sits at the pay station in Tenniel’s Art Shop.
“Hello, I didn’t know you were working here.”
“Yeah, P.U. Art Department is closed.”
“COVID”
“We are doing okay here. There’s been a lot of business from the website, and….”
Rank Majors comes over with his AK over his shoulder.
“Howdy!”
“What did you bring that thing in here for?”
“I never go anywhere without it.”
“Why?”
“I think we have been here before, Daisy.”
“Well, yeah, but I mean I don’t get it. So, try me again.”
“I can sum it up in one word, Replacement!”
“Ah-ha, and what has that to do with your firearm?”
“For one thing, it is a mark of Liberty.”
“Liberty?”
“Right, in case you haven’t noticed, the new administration is bringing in thousands of emigrants to replace white Americans. Need I say more?”
“No, I don’t look at it that way.”
“You, Liberals are going to lose the country.”
“We may do so, but not to through emigration.”
“Well, right, the stolen election is a beginning.”
“Rank, the election was not stolen and there are no replacement people.”
Rank looks at the ceiling for a moment.
“Not as long as I have some ammo, there won’t. That’s how I see it.”
“Fred, what was your question?”
Rank adjusts the strap on his weapon and leans against the counter.
“What have you been up to lately?
Dinah, runs across the floor from under Daisy’s stool in a feline blur.
“Teaching my relationship course from here.”
“You helping people with their love life?”
“No, I am talking about visual relationships.
“Oh, you are back in the art business.”
“Never left it. The store got all the stuff. Come see, you guys.”
She beckons us back into the stock room behind the counter.
The room has new lights, two big screens and a video camera set up before a couple of easels.
“Here is where I teach, online.”
Rank puts his AK on top of a flat-file.
Dinah is mewing in the front of the store.
“How much is it?”
“Fifty bucks a pop. The first ten minutes are free.”
“How many students do you have?”
Daisy clicks a couple of times on the monitor set up under the camera.
“There’s seventeen signed up right now.”
“Doesn’t look like much of an income.”
“It fluctuates. I had over three hundred when the lockdown was serious.”
Rank stares at the monitor.
“All those people with nothing better to do than draw pictures and spend the taxpayer’s money. It is like learning to hand-weave cloth. We have machines to do that now.”
“Well Rank, the artisanal cloth is a booming business.”
“Given the danger, we face these days, it is just irresponsible!”
“So, what are you doing in this store Rank?”
“Stencils, I need some stencils and black ink.”
“You need to go to a craft store for those.”
“Okay Daisy, see you later.”
Rank picks up his weapon and heads out.”
“Thanks anyway!”
Daisy clicks out of her spreadsheet.
“That man has been mugged by an algorithm!”
The cat returns, leaping up on to the keyboard swiftly swatting the screen with a deft right paw. Daisy lifts her off the keyboard.
“It has got him up in arms!”
“I think he is getting even deeper into that stuff.”
“Yes, he wasn’t like that, only last year.”
“Hopalong Cassidy, with an automatic weapon.”
“That old Hollywood cowboy?”
“Rank lives in a black and white world, like a 1950s Western.”
“Oh yes, black hats and white hats.”
“Yeah, before color TV.”
“It’s the politics of distraction, Daisy.”
“It all seems like compulsive clicking to me.”
“Yes, no time to think, just reaction time.”
“No grays, just provocations online.”
“Yeah, okay. We are back to seeing.”
“Anyway, tell me about the art courses you are doing online.”
“Okay, I’ll start with charcoal and paper.”
“Sounds kind of 19th century.”
“Nineteenth-century by twenty-first century means.”
“Do go on!”
Daisy points to one of the large screens.
“So, look at that screen. That is what you would see if you were at home online.”
“I am looking!”
“Drawing is basically a matter of seeing.”
“What about the charcoal part.”
“You have to see relationships.”
“What’s that got to do with my charcoal?”
“Before you can make a mark you have to have seen something.”
Daisy brings up a still picture of a tree seen through the store window
“Sure, I see a tree through the window, but so what.”
“You have to forget about trees and windows and see tones and directions.”
“What?”
“Watch this.”
The vid moves on and the image changes to black and white, with no grays.”
“Good grief, back to Hopalong!”
“Hard to tell all those branches are growing in 3 D space, right?”
“Where are the leaves?”
“That thing is dying. It started last year.”
“Don’t see any cicadas.”
“There are some around the remaining leaves.”
“No, wait. Look at that!”
“You, are seeing!”
“Doesn’t it look like a cicada on that twig on the right.”
“You are reading, not seeing.”
“What do you mean, reading?”
“You found and identified a noun.”
“Oh, you mean I should be drawing the shape.”
“Right, nonverbal.”
“The video is doing the work!”
“Sure, simplifying that complicated image into two tones makes it a lot easier to draw.”
“Yes, I could draw that tree trunk pretty well, I think. Like copying a map.”
“Okay, watch this.”
Daisy clicks again and a fragmented green image appears.
“What is that supposed to show?”
“It shows all the green parts of the image. As if it were a color separation for printing.”
“Okay, but I am not printing. I want to draw.”
“This image shows you a green selection from all the color information in the original picture.”
“A lot of different greens!”
“Aha, keep looking.”
“Right, tree foliage; olive green, frog green, slime green, chartreuse, mold green, even traffic light green! That looks like part of a sign. What’s that weird shape there?”
“You got it! Shapes are the things we see before we can identify an object.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what that shape is.”
“Makes it a lot easier to draw.”
“It does?”
“Sure, you have to look very carefully because you have never seen it before.”
“Oh right, even though it was in the picture. I mean, in the first image you put up.”
“You didn’t see it, did you?”
“Nope.”
“Okay Try to draw a shape between different branches.”
She looks at my drawing.
“Fill it in.”
“Inside the lines, right?”
“Yes, lines only mark the edges of things we see.”
“Yeah, draw a line around the tree trunk and there you have it.”
“You have drawn a diagram. Fill it in and you have a shape.”
I fill the shape with charcoal black.
“You have seen the relationships among the branches.”
“Looks like a weird one to me.”
“Right, nobody looks at those things in our verbal world.”
“I guess not. There is no word for them.”
“The general term for them is, ‘negative shapes.”
“So, it is all kind of abstract.”
“That is where relationships come in.”
“What relationships?”
“Those between, the green shapes and tones in the picture and all the other shapes and tones.”
“There must be millions!”
“There are, and you have to select which ones you want to draw.”
“That depends on how many I can see.”
“There you are. Drawing is about seeing.”
“So is painting, I get that!”
“Your choices create your picture.”
“Wait a minute. What’s that in the upper left?”
“I don’t know.”
“It is the traffic light green. Seems to be moving slowly to the right.”
Daisy clicks into full-color live video.
“It’s gone behind the leaves!”
“No Fred, look further over.”
“Is it a drone?”
“Yeah, I wonder, surveillance or recreational?”
“Both perhaps!”
“Look, there it goes through that gap in the branches!”
“It has gone through my shape!”
“Too big to be a cicada!”
“Why would Tenniel’s be under Surveillance?”
Dinah has fallen asleep in an empty carton, by the trash can.
“Who knows what it might be looking for?”
“This is creepy!”
“WOW!”
“It just flew right through the frame again.”
“So true. That will be fifty bucks please!”
