This memory of the great white father's racist thoughts so discombobulated Curtin's mind that for a few minutes he had to find a seat and close his eyes in meditation. He remembered that Freud, the atheist, had his consulting room filled with hundreds of ancient figurines of gods and goddesses that created the effect of an eerie sacred chamber where religious rites were performed. Like a temple or a museum, he meant this room to suggest that this art and these artifacts from other times and places and the land of memory could effect magical cures on those who came for the cure of their souls. For a minute he thought he was in Freud's consulting room and was free-associating. Then he opened his eyes to see Picasso's mask staring down at him.
Curtin mused about these connections as he read the anthropological wall plaques explaining how, over a century or more, "the decolonization of the colonial gaze" has been taking place. He thought this very good, and was looking forward to the parallel exhibit -- "Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art" -- that was meant to exhibit this change. He wondered if the artists who created this new art of the decolonized gaze grasped the nature of the new colonialism, if they knew of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) and NATO countries' military penetration of the African continent, of the World Bank's and the International Monetary Fund's control, of the NGO's work with the CIA and USAID and foundations that were masks to hide the true nature of continued Western control without the use of the term "colonies." Taking back the gaze was but a first step.
Curtin's primary odyssey, however, was to try to unmask the true font of power in the contemporary world. The world had suffered a series of radical breaks with historical continuity and loss of identity with place, starting shortly after Adams was born in the mid-nineteenth century. Space and time had been contracted by the new technology. Adams had contemplated the dynamo. The computerized cell phone was its current symbol, and its evil twin the concentrated power of nuclear weapons. The modern mind had suffered severe dislocation and confusion. All the ruins, antiques, and artifacts of the past that were collected and commodified over the last 150 years could no more restore lost identities than could the prolific growth in museums in the same period. The museums were the mausoleums of societies dying from within. As he walked around the exhibit, he realized that Picasso, for all his obvious talent, and especially with the works that comprised this show, had no solution. He was a symptom of the depth of the problem, the neurotic symptom that allowed for an ersatz solution, which was, of course, no solution. Like a neurotic who goes for help with his symptoms that have squeezed the life out him but help him hide from his true problems, Picasso's masks, distortions, and play-acting art were impotent. Seemingly potent and wildly celebrated, they hid the "extinction of living inner religiousness," as Spengler put it, that was disappearing from so much of the world, particularly Europe and the United States, the countries that have embraced militarism and war-making as their nihilistic modi operandi. Even the women that populate so much of Picasso's work -- "For me there are only two kinds of women," he said, "goddesses and doormats." -- these women of all shapes and poses, do not offer us a true clue to the power of the Virgin Adams was contemplating alongside the dynamo.
As an only brother with seven sisters, Curtin had grown up among women. He learned that they, like him, were complex, surely neither goddesses nor doormats. One of his sisters had been an artist of rare power. She wished to live as a liberated woman before society sanctioned this. Her art couldn't save her. She died by her own hand, terribly torn between a depraved and distorted religious orthodoxy and dreams of spiritual and artistic freedom. She seemed to him to be a genuine symbol of the nature of modern life, where people yo-yoed back and forth between equally false solutions without grasping the larger cultural and social forces at work. He sensed her tragedy was the tragedy of so much history, where a reactionary cycle seemed to operate. Technology, colonialism, industrialization, the relativization of thought and religion preceded Picasso's grasping of African art and what was perceived as its magical qualities. France for years had been abuzz with the occult, esoterica, magic, trances, etc. Madame Blavatsky and her ilk were celebrated as liberators. Then came the Cubist revolution that ended in France in 1914. The war that brought such vast physical suffering and death ushered in a death in the soul, what John Berger called "inverted suffering," that created vast confusion in people's minds as they became lost within themselves trying to comprehend the absurdities that ensued and what it all could possibly mean. Logic had been turned on its head where it remains, but technology has triumphed. Or so it thinks.
Curtin was exhausted. He grasped Adams' disillusionment. For years he had diligently studied and written about the three political assassinations that had marked his life: JFK, MLK, and RFK. Doing so had become a spiritual necessity for him. He knew why and how they were killed. He knew the culprit: the CIA, the masters of the dark arts. And he knew that the killers had used all the tricks and masks in the magician's playbook to confuse and confound the American public. They had used technology and drugs and art and artists and writers and culture and the mass media to sow bewilderment, to disassociate the minds of average people already confused by the unraveling of history and identity that started in Adams' day. It had been a long century and a long day.
He wished to report his findings, and thought of ending with the following paragraph, that while true, was not a very definitive ending, surely not an answer to the enigma that the day's wandering had brought him:
America has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy to stop the activity of their twenty-million-horsepower society, Americans ignore tragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle Ages; and the world learns to regard assassinations as a form of hysteria, and death as neurosis, to be treated by a rest cure. Three hideous political murders, that would have fattened the Eumenides with horror, have thrown scarcely a shadow on the White House.
No doubt it would have made an eloquent conclusion, but since these were Adams' words, written in 1902, he thought best of it. The words are still true, and sent a shiver down his spine when he remembered them. But he knew they would not satisfy his restless, conspiratorial mind or anyone who might read it. He reminded himself that all his study had led him to the conclusion that life and history are far more obvious than the world prefers to believe. The problem is that people prefer unbelief to belief, mirages to water.
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