Watched the Russian ambassador to the UN killing it at the Security Council meeting today. Then I started thinking about the war, which is awful in general and ruins my mood, which had been so wonderful this weekend.
And then a relevant short little story came to mind, which I'll share with you below the cut.
Reginald Bretnor. The Root of Evil
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Reginald Bretnor. Bug-getter.
OCR & spellcheck by HarryFan, 18 August 2000
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The artist Ambrose Goshok starved constantly. However, he could not afford
to starve beautifully — in an attic in Montmartre or in Greenwich Village.
He resided in a poor part of the American city of Pittsburgh, in a cold,
soot-stained little apartment, cluttered with a multitude of unsold
paintings and soft fleecy furniture that always felt damp to the touch;
stuffing stuck out of its tears here and there. Ambrose's style strikingly
resembled Rembrandt's manner of painting, although in technique the young
artist even surpassed the great master. All of Ambrose's paintings were
ridiculously old-fashioned.
His wife had left Ambrose long ago, giving preference to a resourceful
businessman who managed to sell many thousands of Klee and Mondrian
reproductions at the price of one dollar and ninety-eight cents a piece.
His wife had scrawled her farewell note on the back of a killer bill sent
by the dentist. Two court summonses wallowed on the floor, as well as a
notice from the landlord stating that the artist had to move out. Unshaven
and emaciated, Ambrose sat in the middle of all this bedlam. In his left
hand, he held a newspaper clipping with a review of his paintings written
by a certain J. Herman Lort, a recognized authority on fine arts in
America. In his right hand, a palette knife was tightly gripped; the artist
was desperately using it to scrape off the little green grasshoppers that
had landed on the canvas — on the easel was mounted an unfinished painting
depicting a naked woman: in her time, Mrs. Goshok had posed for her
husband.
The little green grasshoppers — these accursed "cri-ticks," as he called
them — were packed in everywhere. They were running rampant all over the
eastern part of the United States. Ambrose, by and large, didn't care about
them. But they became the proverbial last straw for him, the final ordeal
that broke him. Ambrose scraped the grasshoppers off the canvas and kept
thinking his unusually heavy thoughts.
The artist pondered intensely like this for several hours, and his
thoughts, naturally, rushed into the boundless distance, into the depths
of the inhabited Universe. That is probably why, at three minutes past two
in the afternoon, a buzzing sound was heard outside the window, then the
window sash clicked open from the outside, and following that, a miniature
spaceship flew into the room, resembling an ordinary tub in shape; it
plumped down with a thud onto the carpet bought on credit, which Ambrose
hadn't even managed to pay off yet. A hatch opened in the little ship,
and some strange creature peeked out from it.
"Here I am," said the creature with a faint but unmistakably Slavic accent.
Ambrose, showing not the slightest surprise, tossed a grasshopper over his
shoulder and, flashing his eyes at the alien, said with determination in
his voice:
"No, I will not take you to the city fathers!"
And right then and there he started scraping off the next grasshopper,
whose legs were stuck in the most intimate part of Mrs. Goshok's body.
"Your fathers do not interest me," replied the strange creature,
unfastening from its belt something resembling an advanced blaster. "You
summoned me mentally, because you desire something to be exterminated. And
I, Johnny Fifteen, have flown in to fulfill your desire. Tell me, what is
ruining your life?"
Ambrose lowered his hand with the palette knife.
"Lots of things!" he exclaimed in a fit of temper. "Listen here, kid, the
reason and the manner of your appearance at a difficult moment in my life
compel me to speak seriously with you. Make yourself comfortable."
And Ambrose told the alien all his sorrows: he talked about his
unsuccessful attempt back in art school to get a scholarship, about the
landlord, about his wife, and to top it all off — about the newspaper
clipping signed by "J. Herman Lort," which he read out a little later,
finally getting to the following words: "...after all, it is exactly the
works of such pseudo-creative individuals, these 'original artists' like
Ambrose Goshok, characterized by a flat, almost photographic perception of
reality, that evoke indignation in every astute critic: looking at
Goshok's canvases, a fine connoisseur will find confirmation of that
deeply substantiated doctrine which I expounded in the book 'The
Constructive Creative Personality': a genuine work of art can only be
created by an artist who has studied in special art studios under great
masters, created, which goes without saying, by mastering the richest
treasury of images that the nature surrounding us is populated with, for
example, the images of timber rafted down rivers, birds soaring low over
the earth, uprooted trees and cracked rocks; everything else is merely
deception, a mirage, shameless fraud!" Ambrose hurled the clipping to the
floor.
"It might seem to you," he cried out, "that a mere mortal is powerless to
endure all that has happened to me! But no," he pointed to the pesky
grasshoppers, "on top of everything else, there's this too!"
"And what does 'this' mean?" the creature inquired.
Ambrose took a deep breath, counted to seven, and then screamed
hysterically:
"Cri-ticks!"
"What trifles!" uttered the creature. "I will exterminate them all. Only
you will pay me..."
"Me? Pay?.." Ambrose uttered with bitterness in his voice. "What will I
pay you with?"
"You will pay me with paintings. You will give me six canvases right now.
As an advance payment. Then I will start exterminating your cri-ticks.
Later, when the job is done, you will give me another dozen paintings."
Ambrose decided that eccentric patrons of the arts must inhabit other
planets, but he did not object. He apathetically watched the alien load
his six paintings aboard the ship, and reluctantly waved a hand at him in
farewell. As soon as the alien departed, Ambrose immediately resumed his
activity — he started scraping the grasshoppers off Mrs. Goshok's naked
body again.
The alien returned two years later. This time, however, his spaceship
didn't have to fly in through a window. It simply glided past the towers
of Ambrose Goshok's castle in Florida straight into the courtyard with
fountains somewhat reminiscent of those playing in front of the Taj Mahal
mausoleum, and landed among frolicking young women; looking at their
figures and clothes, one could assume they were inhabitants of a
modernized Muslim paradise. Some of the women — completely naked —
splashed in the fountains. Others loitered around Ambrose and his easel in
the hope that he would try to seduce them. Two beauties stood nearby with
flyswatters in their hands, ready to bring them down on the little green
grasshoppers if they appeared.
The alien didn't pay much attention to the fact that Ambrose nodded to him
rather reservedly.
"It was quite hard to find you," the alien uttered with a chuckle. "Half a
mile north of here I saw huge palaces — ha-ha! — pure marble, just think!
To the south, a Japanese castle — even grander! Who built all this?"
Ambrose replied not too graciously that the palaces belonged to composers,
sculptors, and writers, and the Japanese castle was the whim of one
elderly poetess. However, the alien must excuse Ambrose: he is busy...
The alien didn't seem to pay any attention to the artist's words.
"Look how everything around has changed!" he exclaimed, rubbing his hands.
"Artists are prospering. They have their own yachts, Rolls-Royces,
diamonds, they are surrounded by a multitude of attractive women — owners
of mink coats. I have arrived to collect my fee — the promised twelve
paintings."
"Get out!" Ambrose snapped. "You won't get anything!"
The alien was dumbfounded.
"Aren't you happy?" he countered. "Don't you like this kind of life? After
all, I fulfilled everything as promised. You still owe me a dozen paintings
towards the fee."
At that very moment, a grasshopper jumped onto the canvas with the naked
woman painted on it, over which Ambrose was toiling. The artist tossed his
brush away.
"You won't get anything, you swindler!" he shouted in frustration. "You
never did anything after all! Any artist can achieve success nowadays, but
you have nothing to do with it. Look: this place is still full of those
accursed cri-ticks!"
The alien's jaw dropped in surprise. For a moment he stared at Ambrose,
flabbergasted.
Then he mumbled:
"Cri-ticks — grasshoppers? My God! And here I went and destroyed all the
critics!"
And the thought is this: maybe if we destroy all the politicians, universal prosperity will arrive too?
Not an original one, I know, but a very relevant one.