Pond Water

My little brother texted me yesterday from deep within a spell of studying. The second round of first year med school exams are scheduled for early next week. He and I both balance fanatic work sessions with big time playtime. But this med thing has his mischievous side on lockdown, with one night on the town allotted every two weeks or so.

He’d spent seven hours that morning studying in the Anatomy Lab, which houses fifty cadavers and countless prosections (hearts, joints, limbs). Seven being the max he’s figured out you can be down there with the dead before your own brain starts throbbing with formaldehyde fumes, probably sensing its own premature preservation and sounding the alarm.

He texted me to see if my painting sketch, “Pond Water,” had sold yet because, if it hadn’t, he really wanted it because it looks like a cell and just like an intervertebral disk.

“Like a what?”

“Like if you cut a vertebra in half and look at the cross section from above.”

“You sure you haven’t been overdoing it? Do you have some friends that you can study with?”

“No, I’m serious. It looks exactly like the Annulus Fibrosus and the Nucleus Pulposus.”

“You’re going to have to spell those for me.”

“You didn’t know you were drawing that, did you?”

“I was painting an oil spill like the one in the Gulf. Did you see the people playing in the water? I was thinking about Regina Spektor’s song “The Genius Next Door.” 

"Some said the local lake had been enchanted

Others said it must have been the weather

The neighbors were trying to keep it quiet

But I swear that I could hear the laughter

So they jokingly nicknamed it the porridge

Cause overnight that lake had turned as thick as butter

But the local kids would still go swimming, drinking

Saying that to them it doesn't matter

If you just hold in your breath til you come back up in full

Hold in your breath til you thought it through, you fool

The genius next door was busing tables

Wiping clean the ketchup bottle labels

Getting high and mumbling German fables

Didn't care as long as he was able

To strip his clothes off by the dumpsters

At night while everyone was sleeping

And to wade midway into that porridge

Just him and the secret he was keeping

If you just hold in your breath til you come back up in full

Hold in your breath til you thought it through, you foolish child

In the morning the film crews start arriving

With donuts, coffee and reporters

The kids were waking up hungover

The neighbors were starting up their cars

The garbageman were emptying the dumpsters

Atheists were praying full of sarcasm

And the genius next door was sleeping

Dreaming that the antidote is orgasm

If you just hold in your breath til you come back up in full

Hold in your breath til you thought it through, you foolish child!"

“Well I’ll send you some pictures of Pulposus and you’ll see what I’m taking about.”

It's no accident that this conversation revolved around a painting of a circle. I know more than one painter who only draws circles and circles within circles and finds infinite subject matter there.

Plato’s ideal form of the circle comes to mind. One way of fathoming the original circle, of which all others are shadows.

“For everything that exists there are three instruments by which the knowledge of it is necessarily imparted; fourth, there is the knowledge itself, and, as fifth, we must count the thing itself which is known and truly exists. The first is the name, the, second the definition, the third. the image, and the fourth the knowledge. If you wish to learn what I mean, take these in the case of one instance, and so understand them in the case of all. A circle is a thing spoken of, and its name is that very word which we have just uttered. The second thing belonging to it is its definition, made up names and verbal forms. For that which has the name "round," "annular," or, "circle," might be defined as that which has the distance from its circumference to its centre everywhere equal. Third, comes that which is drawn and rubbed out again, or turned on a lathe and broken up-none of which things can happen to the circle itself-to which the other things, mentioned have reference; for it is something of a different order from them. Fourth, comes knowledge, intelligence and right opinion about these things. Under this one head we must group everything which has its existence, not in words nor in bodily shapes, but in souls-from which it is dear that it is something different from the nature of the circle itself and from the three things mentioned before. Of these things intelligence comes closest in kinship and likeness to the fifth, and the others are farther distant.”

      -- Plato, ‘The Seventh Letter,’ 360 B.C.E. Translated by J. Harward