Twice Thing

By George Choundas

 Twice Thing

Art is a twice thing. For every piece in the world, there actually are two works of art: what the artist made, and what the artist set out to make.

This second—in fact first—art, this ur-art: it forms traveling sweet through the head, a vapor going where it will, more intimate even than another’s body inside your body because it is breath. Next it beads into a glittering lymph. It trickles promises down the gullet and clumps with intention and drops like a fat fruit. Then the urt swells in the trunk, swells, until it shoves the humped parts every artist feels inside while arting and the wounded parts and the champion parts up against a wall of want, a pure blank aching urge to make nothing short of sky itself, which it happens is impossible.

So art is made instead.

Worlds, meanwhile, are finite things, lumps of stuff provisional. Gods and simulation code decide which worlds are worth the trouble, which worlds will be allowed to wither and blink out and which to persist, based strictly on one thing: the state of the half of the art in that world that is not. Meaning: the art that was dreamed, and hoped at, and ventured, but that never came to be. Did you know this? It’s true. Worlds, in short, are judged by their urt. The spidering progressions the ensemble composer loved deeply like a haunting but surrendered, finally, for the base sake of finishing. The shadow-frayed angle the sculptor saw, felt, but could not compel with the stupid chisel borrowed from a housemate because the distractingly gorgeous housemate’s stupid shit chisel would not conduce. On these the fate of a world depends.

Some of a world’s urt will run livelier than its actual art with the tart mix of arbitrarity and conviction we call truth. Some not. Some of its urt will rate a beam of ringing steel to art’s cheese-smelling tatter of carpet. But art can surpass urt, often does. And only where the art exceeds the urt can a civilization justify itself. Because where the real art, the finished art, falls short of the urt, is verifiably lesser than the urt, those civilizations are done already. Where even the artists have stopped dreaming and spend their days feeding on compromise, that world is dead already.

The above is what I wrote when I set out to write about my mother. Her brother, my Tío Omar, who taught me his swatter-free secret for killing flying insects and called me Torito, died three weeks ago. My mother told a friend that losing him was like a knot in the heart. This other one, thinks she’s smart, she said, Not a knot, a knot is dense and present, but loss means emptiness, so a hole, not a knot. And my mother said, Have you ever seen a nest, abandoned, in a tree without leaves in winter? It looks like a knot in a jumble of string. It looks just like a knot.

Sometimes art because the other we cannot, and sometimes because we just can’t. Maybe you know this already. That the above is what I wrote when I set out to write about Tío.

George Choundas work has appeared in over fifty publications, including The Best Small Fictions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, and Subtropics. My story collection, The Making Sense of Things (FC2), was awarded the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, as well as shortlisted for the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, the St. Lawrence Book Award for Fiction, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. He is a winner of the New Millennium Award for Fiction, a former FBI agent, and a Cuban- and Greek-American.