Late at night in a hotel lobby: when the darkness hurts my eyes
I'm writing this from
Springfield, Illinois. Three blocks away, in St. John's Hospital, in an
intensive care unit, one of the finest artists I've ever known lies on his back,
inflatable pads massaging his lower legs, his eyes swollen shut, his chest
rising and falling with with what seems like vigor, but is in fact an external
pump.
If Tom Artis
wakes, it will probably be to a different and unguessable
sky.
I can't rail
against the hand that struck him, because that hand is at least as big as the
world.
I can be
angry about what life could have offered him, and what it gave him instead.
Tom is very much
more than an illustrator, although his facility was dazzling. A page from his
sketchbook is an education in drawing, but watching him do it would just plain
scare you.
Tom
throws off sparks: he'll fill up a sketchbook the way others will leaf through a
newspaper, and not just with faces, bodies human, in- and super-, but conceits,
environments, whole alien technologies, and, when he's doodling, celtic knot
patterns.
When we
worked together, Tom gave me what the writer just a little bit better than me
asked for.
And
though while he lives I won't grieve, I'm sitting here feeling like I'm watching
a bulldozer biting into a
cathedral.
The
summer movie season is opening, and they're spending hundreds of millions of
dollars remaking The Poseidon Adventure and the Omen, and my friend is lying
there, kissed over and over by a
respirator.
When we
went to comics conventions, he would sell pages from his sketchbooks at
ridiculously low prices--2 and 3 bucks for the most part--not from any
naiveté, but from the assurance easy as breathing that he could always make
more. He was as generous as a
bonfire.
This man
is my friend, and I want him to have had a life filled...this man should be a
man people lie about, saying they know him, to make themselves look cooler and
smarter and filled with more
magic.
in the 9th
century St. Anselm thought he had a proof of the existence of God. He argued
that God must be the being embodying the greatest of all qualities--and that one
of those qualities is existence. Therefore, God has to
exist.
Pretty good,
but no cigar. Rather than prove the existence of God, all it does is set up the
distinct possibility that we live in a piss-poor excuse for a
universe.
Which is
how it looks, sitting here.
Posted: Monday - June 12, 2006 at 11:33 PM