always the same and yet

When I was in Year Two or Three our art teacher used to tell us not to draw flying ems when we meant birds. It occurs to me now that she must have spent years watching different groups of children draw the same flying ems, and that possibly she harboured feelings of idealism towards us, hoping that we would show a few of the qualities that children are supposed to have when it comes to art, namely spontaneous freedom and originality. She wanted us to invent our own birds, or at least our own shorthand. Year after year she must have felt a terrible disappointment when her students persisted in these flying ems.

I thought of those ems a few days ago when, coming to the end of Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of Terry Zwigoff's film about Robert Crumb, I saw a picture of Charles Crumb's art. Charles is Robert's older brother. When he was young he drew comic book panels, with characters and dialogue balloons, but over time the dialogue took over the panels, crowding out the characters and spreading into the margins, until everything disappeared, even the letters, and in their place he drew rows of tiny slanting humps that resemble (until you look at them carefully) cursive script.

They look like rows of our ems.

MMMMMMMMMMMMMM

The first thing that came to me when I saw Crumb's ems was not my art teacher but a page in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz. A short way into the book Sebald mentions the French Nobel Laureate, Claude Simon, who, in turn, leads him to the subject of "a certain Gastone Novelli," a man who was tortured in Dachau during World War II. After the war, unable to bear the sight of "any so-called civilized being," Novelli left Europe for the jungles of South America. There he met a group of indigenes who spoke to him in a language that consisted mainly of vowels, "particularly the sound A in countless variations of intonation and emphasis." After some time he returned to Europe and became a painter. "His main subject," writes Sebald, "was the letter A." He painted the capital A "in scarcely legible ciphers crowding closely together and above one another, always the same and yet never repeating themselves, rising and falling in waves like a long drawn-out scream."

Then Sebald prints three lines of screaming A.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I thought of them when I saw Crumb's M.

MMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMM

I had the impression that the vowel man and the consonant man were speaking to one another, one with his mouth open and the other with his mouth sealed permanently shut, but each side as inarticulate as the other, and each one struggling to make himself known. I imagined these two men in a hopeless partnership of the eyes.

This is the kind of romantic fiction you come up with when you're trying to make sense of a mystery, as, perhaps, I tried to make sense of my art teacher, all those years ago, when she told us not to draw flying ems -- told us this so repeatedly, and with such emphasis, that I still remember her doing it, and, in fact, remember the room around her, and the height of her, above us on a chair, while we sat on the floor, which was hard, cold, and not carpeted. Why did she dislike flying ems, I must have wondered, and what did she want us to put in their place? It was often evident that adults wanted something, but the nature of that thing was almost always obscure. They were AAA it seems to me in retrospect, always open-mouthed and expectant, and we, on the floor -- we were MMM.