On Negative Space
1.
I would need to be held, I think. The photo shows The Calling of St. Matthew hanging adjacent to the equally as devastating Caravaggios, St. Matthew and the Angel and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew inside Rome’s Contarelli Chapel. I search caravaggio contarelli chapel at least once a week and shiver every time. It’s the middle of summer. My self-guided tour is the same: first the photo taken from around the corner of the room in which they hang, then the photo with the reverent upward angle. Then, under incandescent lighting, the photo that directly confronts St. Matthew and the Angel, the two others on either side pointing towards it like path and destination. Around Matthew and the angel, lit so serenely, is no shadow, no gradient, the most blunt confrontation of the void out of the three. So much of it to fall into. The intense light of meeting a higher power requires so much inverse darkness. I would need to be held, but how to hold what is not there?
No one paints nothing like Caravaggio. The space around his subjects is a subject itself. That beyond-black presence—the nothing around something—has never been so rich. The negative space. For something not there, it is formidably instructive. As with most things that aren’t, there is the drive to fill negative space with is. Negative space is design. It defines the relationship of one element to another. It is the limit of the subject. It is where a painting breathes. It is storing every possibility. It is where fantasy occurs.
It wasn’t until my first term of art school that I was able to practice drawing from a live model. I had only drawn from static, unfatigued figures in magazine editorials and ads. Draw the space around them, the professor would instruct during a longer pose. If you cannot draw the hand, draw the space around the hand. The paper is now a shadow.
Continuing to confuse chiaroscuro with negative space. Even the name for my own abscess is elusive. Negative space being the space absent of subject, chiaroscuro being the darkness in value of that absence of subject, the darkness of the space without. There is, apparently, a compromise. While tenebrism developed from chiaroscuro, unlike that technique, it did not strive for greater three-dimensionality, but was compositional, using deep darkness as a kind of negative space.
Everything in my room has so much to say: blanket folds, pillowcase wrinkles, lines created by the shirts on my bed. Life has leaked from me, infused them. I cannot feel my lines. Hard to feel without someone tracing them. Sex is like my name being told to me repeatedly, except one quickly irritates, except one I am able to remember. Concentrate on the feeling of you not touching me. It feels like the heat of the lamp, casting values across me that would, when drawn, reveal the lines I cannot feel.
What came first: the dark or the light? The negative or positive value? My mother told me from a young age: there’s some hole in you. An accusation, but I felt it too. I did not consider the hole an open secret. Just open. Is increased invisibility not the privilege of a hole? Did I start writing because of the hole, or did I write the hole into me? Out of me, whatever was there before. At some point it must have occurred to stop trying to fill it, to empty whatever was left inside. The closest I could get to doing something about it.
The amnesia of your absence: did you ever exist at all? I read your messages to prove you were once there, thinking of me, here. I consider going to the grocery store and wonder if that’s real, either. It takes me a moment to understand that someone is looking at me, when they are. My slow recognition probably looks like a stare, like I want something I don’t, or am not supposed to want. People tell me I’m tall, sometimes strangers, and I come to realize that You’re bothers me more than tall. Tall like an indictment. It feels less and less like something I command, or are, reminding me of all of me I no longer stick to. Phantom inches. You asked me my height the second time you called, said all the same things. Talking on the phone leaves the body behind; a satellite. An imagined wire will host you now. Your voice is taller than me. I only need to feel myself to the extent that my back is against the wall, my hand holding the phone.
2.
I want to call it eerie, that thing I recognize in Caravaggio’s paintings. Eerie: a situation where something is either too missing or too present, within the scene’s generally understood context. He often accomplishes both at once. I retreat from the glistening figure emerging from the darkness around it. Is it an evil in me startled by what is alive and colorful? Blank black space: a mythological creature with an unknown lore.
This book is an artwork unto itself, reads the art book’s favorite review. I lift the first page of a tucked away three-paneled print of The Calling of St. Matthew only to quickly collapse the panels again at the first sight of utter blackness that is the top left corner. Darkness shrouds Jesus, his halo nearly severed by the split of shadow and light. He points at Matthew; the light points at Matthew; Matthew points at himself. Both are cast by God: the light thrown and the tax collector invited into apostleship. The splintering light that is your higher power requires so much inverse darkness.
When I describe my negative space, I call it a non-subject area. Darkness and blackness have been called upon so often to describe this that they have seeped into subjectivity, escaping their original function of obscurity. Is this success - becoming light and line? The void is a meme. Dark, the dark, is a destination too often used by my mother and others who can’t elaborate on what the dark looks like, why it occurs, and why I shouldn’t become it.
I sleep with you, negatively speaking. Which is to say you sleep and I lie curling in positions around you. Forced to live through the night like I was made of it. You smile in the morning as though one of us is not more acquainted with night than the other. Metaphor: will I ever join you in normalcy, subjecthood, sleep? I had closed my eyes, saw the colors, believed it was happening. There’s no better way to illustrate everything else about you and me.
If what is negative is forgotten, then the positive is what has been forgotten to be forgotten. The subject may exist to give shape to the nothing around it. How many times did I believe I loved someone when I actually loved the shape the world took around them? The way everything else appeared when forced to accommodate their space in the frame? I loved being the substance moving through the world in the shape of their silhouette.
I became better at acting than saying. Subtle, sculpted manipulations were my ways of speaking without having to say anything. At least, not what I wanted to say. At least, not what would bring me into the light. My speech jagged, cut in parts. To fragment feels virtuous, a dispersing of myself into others so as not to be a selfish whole.
(A selfish hole).
In our triptych - me, you, and the space between - I can’t remember who the light cast down on. It’s easier to add dark value than it is to erase it.
3.
I can only look at the paintings in the book during daylight hours. Something about all that empty space in the dark is threatening when I haven’t created it myself.
The tarot reading my friend gives is somewhat grave. We smoke half a joint and she’s pulling cards and making faces and telling me what they mean. High, I’ve never been paranoid about anything happening inside of me. Only what’s on the outside. Only how the inside translates to the outside. It’s not that she’s revealed the death card; I know enough to know the reaper catalyzes change within life as well as outside it. She puts her hand over another card and looks at me with eyes that either suck everything out of me or push all of her into me. We’re both seeing some of me in the light for the first time. I’m the friend in the movie you lose to paranormal activity. I know how that character, afforded so little point-of-view, feels before they’re turned inside-out by the hungry, nothing entity. I want to accuse her of trying to scare me in a sleepover way but see that, really, her eyes aren’t asking anything of me. They’re just seeing.
In the rooms where paintings hang we are the negative space.
Judith somewhat timidly slays Holofernes on the book’s pages before me. Her seduction successful, he is the one left bleeding out after having pillaged her town. He is captured forever in the moment we all count on ending quickly. In one still scene, Holofernes is halfway decapitated, turned toward Judith in a moment of realizing his fate and agony—there is no mistaking that the mouth agape could mean anything else. Still, he is beautiful, his skin a living ochre. Death: as long as there are still words to stick to it—“imminent”, perhaps—is worthy of lighting. Suffering to the front. Retreating into the nothing-space is cowardly; bolder than execution, bolder than executing, is the choice to act. The void background has yet to overcome them, any of them, though a shadow starts to dim Holofernes’s face. In his forever agony, a hint of time passing. Is he exhibiting terror or ecstasy, the shadow finally engulfing him?
July 3rd: I don’t necessarily hate or dislike him for how things ended. His near disappearance is now a certain disappearance. Now that the anxiety has passed, the uncertainty of his remaining a subject, I’ve found relief on the other side, I can only sit and have a tiny lament over crossing paths with someone in the light.
4.
The online magazine has chosen Self-Portrait as the Sick Bacchus to accompany the short article discussing Caravaggio’s light. Four pages available for printing and one is fully occupied by Bacchus. The figure, painted in ill tones of green and yellow, resists becoming the black nothing behind it. It will be a lot of ink; my printer can do it. A paper slick and black sliding onto the tray; can I do it? If Caravaggio-as-Bacchus is sick, does this make the void a compassionate one? For once it is easier to look into the dark when forced to choose between it and the rotten figure. You know things are grave when Caravaggio, whose figures usually writhe in warmth, uses an outright blue tone in the body.
I’ll fade to black and disappear of my own accord. But there are times when I retreat into negative space only to enact the gravity of doing so. I pull you into me. You can’t see the schemes taking place in the dark. I find images of Contarelli Chapel’s interior from new, accidental-looking angles, the paintings somehow always in frame. What is this gravity the Caravaggios hold, and can you feel it, as someone who’s never sought it?
[Caravaggio] achieved this effect with a limited palette typical of 17th-century painters: iron oxide colors (red ocher, yellow ocher, umber), a few mineral pigments (vermilion, lead-tin yellow, lead white), organic carbon black, and verdigris.
Allowing for light is what killed Caravaggio. Like much of his life, there is no official documentation of his death, though lead poisoning seems to be a comfortable theory for those who speculate. Lead white, predating zinc and titanium, contains exactly what its name suggests.
St. Matthew, too, sees his end in the light. Though his life begins again upon meeting Christ, so too his death. Receiving the light Caravaggio has cast first from an out-of-frame God, then from Jesus, Matthew’s call to sainthood has a sequel in Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. He worked on them simultaneously. Only the dead can be saints. Matthew must become one before the other. The darkness inherent to becoming an eternal light.
Richard Siken: I have my body and you have yours. Believe it if you can. Negative space is silly.
My writing is not toward myself. That would be frivolous; my goal is to dissipate into others, take up space in their little corners where they might find me later. One thing I do write to myself:
Stop believing in nothing until it is something. Stop believing that what is not there is more powerful than what is. I wake in the bed where I changed shapes throughout the night assuming that my mere presence is the reason you no longer want me.
Living in negative space is desperate voyeurism. I think I am learning how to be until you, in the light, are gone, and all space is just space again.
A subject has boundaries; negative space is forever-shaped. If I end this essay with a period, I will have made something I can hold to the light, myself dissolving in it.