FIXTURE

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Tom Lichtenberg

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PART ONE

THE EARLY YEARS

It's hard to imagine a time before the Fixture. Yet for a period, it existed only in the mind of its illustrious creator, Darian Sebastian Fark. Memories do exist from those before the Fixture. But those memories are few and faulty and we have trouble interpreting their feelings of the absence.

In those pre-Fixture days, progress had begun its Seventh Renaissance. There was new construction everywhere. New offices, new houses, new factories, new everything. The quality of life was improving. And to go along with all of this advancement, Fourth Fidelity Bank decided to promote the arts, as they occasionally still do. They were expecting an increase of their visibility on the world stage in return.

After some consideration, Fourth Fidelity selected Darian Fark to build the centerpiece of their new headquarters. But we are getting ahead of ourselves already. This is not the beginning of the story, although when thinking of the Fixture it is hard to imagine a beginning at all. We can however begin with Darian, the artist, the creator. But we would be remiss if we neglected to mention his forebears.

His mother, Mary Alice Simpson Fark taught a kindergarten class. She specialized in finger-paints and brown paper bag animal masks. She seems to have been the major influence on the youthful Darian. Her philosophy of “leaving kids alone to do what they will” resulted in his being left quite alone throughout his formative years. She was often to be found squatting in her special corner of the small Fark house, playing alone and conversing with her dolls, especially Sandra Mae, her favorite.

Jasper Louis Fark, the father, was a wandering salesman of the metaphysical variety and a collector of peculiar artifacts. The Fark abode was literally stuffed with sacred things and Darian grew up in a world where art was more than commonly abundant.

Jasper Fark was not a friendly man, to say the least. He had little fondness for his only son, his only child, Darian, and Darian despised him, or so he later claimed.

We know Jasper mostly through his legal record, which was a lengthy one. He was first charged as a teenager, for loitering. According to his statement he was merely “waiting for a sign and failed to observe the one that said no trespassing” We next hear of him a year later through court documents filed when he married Mary Alice Simpson.

Shortly thereafter, Jasper embarked on a husband-only honeymoon. He abandoned his bride and set off on a course which can still be clearly followed by a rather hefty collection of police reports. The jurisdictions vary but the charges are the same. Public nuisance, vagrancy, loitering, trespassing, minor theft, indecent exposure, and intent to flee. At some point during this period, Jasper Fark remembered he was married and returned to his wife.

About a year after Jasper returned, Darian was born. Jasper never left off wandering, but as he aged, his arrests were steadily less frequent. He continued to preach the word of, whosever word it was that he was preaching. Some saw it as a combination of orgiastic Sufism and penitential scourging. Others recall he used the phrase 'His terrible swift sword' an awful lot.

One thing is clear, wherever Jasper went, whatever he said and did, he always returned home loaded down with animistic objects. The Fark house was a small one, with a single bedroom, a living room, a kitchen with a pantry, a basement and the tiny attic.

For awhile Jasper stored his finds in the basement, but they later became so numerous that the entire house was cluttered save for the kitchen, the only room off limits to his collection. The kitchen was filled with Mrs. Fark's own artistic works.

Jasper Fark was not an art dealer, though. He never sold a single thing, and never parted with any of his treasures. Once he had his objects safely stored, he seems to have forgotten all about them.

The attic was Darian’s room, accessible only by a rope which dangled from the window. Darian undoubtedly ascended it at night, and descended in the morning. His father's artifacts had found their way up there, mostly through the help of Darian. And he was literally surrounded with these objects day and night.

Darian was a shy and lonely boy, living in a world of private fantasy. That's easily said, but perhaps the implications are more subtle. We humans always live in fantasy. Those of us called sane merely share a common social fantasy, while the insane simply have a fantasy all their own. Darian never saw the need for believing in the collective social myth, or perhaps he was trying to create a new one starting with himself. We may never know. But we do know he spent his earliest years in the utmost isolation. His only friends were his father's dogs and his parents never reared him to be a member of the masses.

Later, when he went to school, he preferred to play with clay and mud and stones, rather than with the other children. Their games never seemed to interest him. Some of these children taunted him. None of these children ever entered Darian's home. In truth, they didn't even know him, despite their later claims.

One person in Darian’s childhood who did care was Hildegard Brennan, the school principal where Darian’s mother taught. Hildegard noticed something special about Darian early on. She recalled him as an abnormally small boy, very thin, with nearly invisible straw-colored hair, terrible eyesight, and tenth generation clothes.

Ms. Brennan once recalled a meeting she had with the young artist. She asked him if he was happy. He said “Yes, he was.” “What?” she asked, “What are you happy about?” “The world,” he said, “is full of shapes.”

We receive a sense of concentration and focus, an almost hypnotic quality about the boy. She asked him, “What about the shapes?” He answered, “There are many of them.”

Besides the quotes about the shapes, she didn't have much else to say about the artist. The kids at school were mean to him, but what could she do? In other words, she left him alone as well. I'm sure Darian didn't mind. He was used to doing things his way, and any interference would have been unwelcome. He seems to have spent most of his time observing, observing shapes, no doubt. He watched the passing clouds, the patterns in the parched or soaked red earth, the shapes of natural and man-made things and creatures, and, most of all, imaginary shapes existing only in his mind.

Life for Darian continued this way until Darian was about ten years old. No longer content to merely observe the shapes of the world, he began to create some shapes himself. His parents apparently had no objections to his work, but as usual they did nothing to encourage him. And it seems certain that during this formative period of his life, he was simply experimenting with the possibilities.

I will attempt a description of some of these very early objects but I believe it would take an entirely different language than ours, symbolic as it is, to describe the works of Darian Fark. This does not stop us from attempting descriptions however, even if they bear little resemblance to reality.

Two pieces from this early period are in the memorial museum. One is approximately seventeen inches high, while the other rises to a full two feet. The larger piece appears to be some kind of swollen worm, basking in a rounded, net-like leaf, suspended on a rope over a waterfall of lumpy mud. Others may see it differently, of course. The other statuette is actually cut from stone, and looks more like a leaky, lidless, casket filled with porridge. The worm piece is much more complicated, and interesting.

Darian was producing sculptures constantly during this period and not showing them to anyone. He showed little interest in his classes, and his grades were very bad. He had no use for spelling, grammar, history or math, and the only subject that seemed to interest him at all was science. His science teacher recalls that Darian would frequently interrupt to ask all sorts of questions stemming from a class the day or week before. He seems to have tried to puzzle things out on his own before he turned for help.

Darian had no social life in his early teenage years. He had no interests or hobbies that he felt the need to share with others.  Perhaps he felt no need of friends or companions during these years. He was probably seen as unusual by his peers, but so were his parents by theirs and his odd behavior must have been expected. Had Jasper and Mary Alice turned out a normal son, the community would have been shocked.

Whenever Jasper came home from one of his missionary ventures, he became the town pariah as long as he remained. He never did preach within the town limits, nor would he have been allowed to if he tried.

Jasper considered the town damned to all eternity, and claimed he only lived there as a witness, like Jonah in Nineveh, or Jesus in Jerusalem. But he was highly active in the larger cities, the great urban centers where the “real sin was to be found.”

When Jasper was at home, he merely exhorted his wife to go on producing visible works for the greater glory of God. According to Jasper, “God created man to do things, and therefore everything we do belongs to God.”

Harriet Bridges Washington was the town librarian where Darian grew up. A modest, unassuming woman, it was she who was the first to stumble upon the work of our artist.

Harriet was preparing to open a permanent children's exhibition room in the lobby of the library. She contacted Mrs. Fark through the school and arranged a visit to see the classroom’s art works.

One of the things Harriet admired most was not by one of the students, though. It was a brown paper bag mask made by Mrs. Fark herself. Harriet wanted it anyway, and asked if she could see some of Mary Alice's other works.

She soon found herself in the kitchen of the Fark house, and watched Mary Alice rummage through her pantry, looking for more of her work. Harriet turned and looked through the window. A young child was playing in the mud. “Is that Little Darian?” She said. Indeed it was. “What's he doing?” Harriet asked. “Whatever he wants to,” Mrs. Fark replied. Harriet was not content with this response and stepped outside to ask the boy himself.

She introduced herself, but Darian did not turn from his task. She asked him what he was doing, and he merely grunted “Work”. “What kind of work?” she asked. Darian sighed, then stared her in the face and said, “I'm examining the texture and consistency of this material. Then, considering the nature and the circumstance involved, I will determine the proper form conducive to the ultimate expression of this matter”.

“Oh, I see” She said. "Oh yeah?" Darian retorted "What do you see?" She replied that she'd like to watch him work. But Darian responded with, “I only work alone”. Then she asked if she could see some of the things he'd done, and finally he relented, and said, okay, why not?

Darian walked over to his shed, opened the door and then sat down cross-legged in the corner, among his works. Harriet was astonished and bewildered by the things. She knew, she later claimed, that she was in the presence of a genius.

Finally, she asked him what they were, and he said, in his customary fashion, “Shapes.” She asked, “Shapes of what?" and he seemed puzzled by the question.

Darian agreed to let her take some things and put them in the library, and she chose the oddest and most complicated pieces from the lot. They were an immediate sensation. Parents from all over town demanded their removal. Harriet saw nothing wrong with the objects and defied the critics to spell out their objections. This left them rather baffled, for none of them could say exactly what they felt was wrong with them. They only had a “feeling”, They were “creepy”. One informant said, “you got the strangest feeling that they were going to reach right out and strangle you.” “They were almost alive” another said, “alive and very hungry.” Most of the townsfolk agreed that the things were about things that were eating other things.

What the “things” were, no one could say, but they didn't like them, and they had to go. Harriet fought to preserve these aspects of the local culture, but after several days she lost, and the statues were returned to Darian, who calmly put them back where they had been before.

"You have real talent," Harriet told him, and he only nodded. But this experience opened up a whole new world of ideas to the budding Fark. He realized, for the first time in his life, that these pieces could evoke responses from other people, that his was essentially a social form of work.

He later said of this event that, “The whole thing had given me a thrill. I really got those assholes up in arms. They were furious. I loved it. It never had occurred to me before that simple forms could cause such aggravation. It made me want to learn just what it was about these shapes that caused such responses.”

For the first time, other people's notions of reality started to interest him. Before this, he had assumed that everybody saw the same things in the same world. But some of what they said about his work made Darian realize that everyone was crazy in their own way. His work wasn't merely one activity out of many possible for all, but a unique phenomenon, available only to himself, that no one else could imitate, or even understand. He was wrong about this, of course. There has been no shortage of Fark imitators since he rose to his great fame. Schools were founded on his principles, but they found it hard to teach what Darian himself only barely understood.

He began to read about art theory, encouraged by Harriet. He read the history of art, the lives of various artists, and accompanied Harriet on numerous trips to museums, where the young Darian would frequently spend all day studying a single piece of art.

At home his work progressed. And for the next few years he experimented with all sorts of shapes. He occasionally would place one of his works outside of City hall to test how people would react to his shape. Each of these objects was destroyed by the town’s constituents soon after it appeared. He listened to people’s comments, and puzzled over what was meant by “ludicrous”, “insane”, “obscene”, and “just plain gross”. He wondered what was wrong with them - with the people, not the pieces - that made them all react the way they did.

Now, Darian was still in school throughout this period in his life, and it got tougher every year - not just the schoolwork, which he never could keep up with, but the kids, who ridiculed him mercilessly. At the age of sixteen and a half, Darian completed the 11th grade, and decided that was enough. He did not return to school again, and nobody, with the exception of Harriet Washington, gave a damn. And it's at this point in our story where he meets Mr. Jones, the spectrum showman who would become his first confidant and possibly his only friend.

Seraphim Jones was a minstrel of the Seventh Renaissance. He was several years ahead of his time, and he knew it too. When the Sixth Renaissance was over, Seraphim found himself out of a job, like many other people at the time. He was laid off from the Academy of Tools, and there was nothing else for him to do but pack his bags and head out on the road, performing the odd laser show over here and over there, dazzling his audiences, and scraping up a meal.

Mr. Jones believed in the theory of “creative evolution” or, to use the proper term, “indeterminate determinism.” He was convinced that the future, although it is composed of finite possibilities, nevertheless remains wide open to the inevitability of unpredictable and thoroughly random mutations. This was only one of the many ideas he introduced our artist to, during the years of their sojourn together as a wandering freak show/minstrel team. You will recall the fact that Seraphim was a traveling artist, a musician, tinkerer, explorer, and most of all, a man of many and varied words. He was fascinated with the shapes of sound, as recorded and produced by the several weighty high-tech gadgets he carried with him everywhere. These were invisible shapes made visible by the power of computer simulation, an art of which he was a certified master.

Everywhere Seraphim went he introduced the masses to the possibilities of a glimpse into the temporal and the infinite. His mission was poorly paid, but he survived, and traveled the length and breadth of the country dazzling the public with his displays.

He would arrive in a small town and find the main drag or a parking lot at the local shopping mall, unpack his goods, convince someone to let him tap into their power source, wait until dusk, and begin his work. Crowds gathered, people oohed and aahed, the merchants complained, the police arrived, and he'd be asked to leave. People cheered, they offered him extension cords, they told everyone about him, and they contributed some quarters or a dollar bill.

One of the people most impressed with him was our wandering preacher Jasper Fark, whose congregation soon switched over to the excitement of Mr. Jones. Jasper didn’t mind his loss, he was just as enthralled with the show as everyone else.

Jasper followed Seraphim for a while before approaching him. Both of them were talkers, and loved an audience. Jasper first offered the use of his truck to Seraphim, and the duo spent a few months on the road together. Jasper Fark returned to his home one day with his illustrious guest.

Darian was immediately enthralled with the performer. Seraphim took a liking to the kid, and showed him his machines. Jasper also sat in on these lessons, convinced that he was witnessing the ultimate testament to the glory of his God - the invisible made real, the ether illumined in color, the heavens made manifest through the power of Jones' wizardry. But Darian's interest was in the actual shapes themselves, and he had found his first true friend, the only kindred spirit he had ever yet encountered and perhaps the only one he ever would.

During his stay in the Fark house, Seraphim became as impressed with Darian's work as Darian was with his. And so, when Seraphim was making preparations to leave he asked if Darian would like to travel with him. Our subject immediately agreed and the two snuck off together in the middle of the night. They started their journey on foot. Darian would never see his parents again. Soon after Darian left his mother died and Jasper Louis Fark began to wander again, continuing to preach his own modified version of someone else’s gospel.

If anyone is interested in a day by day account of their travels which lasted a few years, I recommend you read the memoirs of Seraphim Jones, especially the volumes entitled “The Darian Years.” Seraphim's books are suspect, as are all self recorded accounts. They are high on self-promotion, and rather low on facts, but reading them might give an insight into the life of the artist.

I’d like to introduce some general themes and personal essentials that will help explain the Fixture, Darian’s most important work. For this purpose, some insight into the character of the artist might be useful. I have found, during my extensive research, many quite contradictory portraits of his nature. Seraphim Jones insists that Darian was an obsessive and brooding man, who would occasionally fall into inexplicable fits of black depression. He says that Darian had an aversion to the public bordering on allergy. On the other hand, he states that Darian's was an unparalleled artistic genius, and that he seemed to have an almost extraterrestrial power of vision.

Darian would spend many long hours in the middle of the night, experimenting with the Jones machines, and by morning he would have a host of new designs and applications ready to be installed. With Darian's assistance, Jones was able to construct a number of quite unthinkable gadgets and devices, which extended his performances far beyond their original extent, from mere light displays to intricate, highly mathematical exercises in incomprehensibility.

There is every reason to doubt that Darian's aptitude was as magical as Seraphim makes it seem, and his books read more like travel adventure than a true and thorough account of the events that actually transpired. On the other hand, we do know that by the time they went their separate ways, Darian had learned an incredible amount about machinery, electronics and construction, knowledge that would later become synthesized into the Fixture. We cannot say with any certainty how this expertise was acquired, but we do know that is was.

Darian was a boy when he and Seraphim joined up. His departure from home and his many travels were perhaps born from a craving for novelty or independence. Darian matured on the road, adventuring, learning new things. He still observed how his art affected those who experienced it. Indeed, that might have been his sole concern at the time.

Darian Fark never seems to have been a genuine adolescent. He viewed these travels as a necessary preparation for the work he knew that he was going to do someday. He was seriously committed to this endeavor and never gave doubt much thought.

I think we can conclude that the artist was a sober, thoughtful youth. People who knew him have remarked that he rarely smiled but I can guess that this was due to his constant thinking.

He must have made a curious counterpart to the effervescent loudmouth Jones, and people wondered what the two had in common. But it was a genuine artist's bond. During their time together, the shows evolved from simple laser fireworks to amazing sky wide works of art. They made light stand still in the atmosphere for up to half an hour, while they added on new pieces and new strands, until they had an ever changing color sculpture living and breathing in the air. These towers of light were accompanied by a dazzling array of other shorter rays and sparks, shooting up and spinning around to the sounds of light created by the synthesizer recorders.

They were no longer confined to shopping malls and parking lots. A few years after Darian left home the duo were performing in cathedrals, theaters and museums. Their shows were becoming legendary. They no longer lived in empty lots, but stayed in fine hotels, and in the houses of important dignitaries of the art world. They referred to their collective works as “Graven Images”. Seraphim, as usual, had grandiose theories and ideas connected with the work, and used to give long speeches before and after their shows expounding on these ideas to the crowds.

Darian seems to have dismissed all that as quite beside the point, and following his lead, I shall do likewise. You can read Jones' books if you're interested in such ideas.

We have said that Darian was cautious, thorough, meditative, intuitive and quiet. As he was in those years, so he remained until his death. He doesn't seem to have changed much, despite events and changing circumstances. When he split with Seraphim Jones, he rented out a small studio and devoted himself to the furtherance of his art.

He lived alone, but he wasn't left alone. Eventually Darian would command an audience the size of the world, but in his small studio he only had room for the occasional friend or acquaintance stopping by on their way through town. In the summers he would exhibit his work, either on the street or in a museum. Space never mattered to Darian. Each of his shows was more successful than his last. Why he always chose the summertime to display his creations we might never know.

The influence of Seraphim Jones in Darian’s work during this period seems to have vanished utterly. His pieces weren't painted. There were no bright colors. There was no accompanying musical score. His pieces still sat alone at this point, although later the connections between his sculptures would become a central theme of his work. It is difficult to describe these structures, but I shall make an attempt, however feeble it might seem.

In terms of my own field, architectural mythology, Darian’s early shows were full of meaning. The basic pre-war attributes were there; cramped, fixated resistance to artificial limitations, rootless upward movement, clutching, all-embracing selfish firmness, full serious absurdity, and finally, the firm conviction of the shell that must save its hollowness from intrusions. All these points have many implications, most of which I touch on in my lectures concerning Darian and his work.

The critics of his day didn't know what they were witnessing of course. But they were suitably impressed. He gained a bit of notoriety and one of his summer exhibits was shown at several museums in major cities all around the world. The audience which anticipated this display with exaggerated zeal was oddly disappointed with its presence.

The show consisted of twenty seven pieces, varying in size from the minuscule to the gargantuan. The tiny pieces were of clay and zinc, lumpy, unappealing shapes, reminiscent of the melted girder beams seen nightly from Amman during the World War then taking place.

Other pieces were also images of destruction and decay. People didn't want to be reminded that then President Harper was threatening to exterminate the planet to safeguard essential national interests. They wanted some divertissement, some appealing, thought absorbing stimuli, but only in one piece did Darian gratify this wish.

This statue was destined to become his second most famous work. It was twenty-four feet high, and forty-two feet wide around the widest part. Although it was untitled, as are all of Darian’s works, the public placed a title on it presumably because they felt they needed to. It became known as the Dinosaur. Unlike the beasts, it had no distinguishable limbs, or rather, too many of them. The head might be the tail, or the other way around. It was a massive skeleton, made up of almost innumerable little bones.

Exhaustive study later exposed that the Dinosaur consisted of seven thousand five hundred eighty seven separate pieces, and these “bones” were made of everything and anything. From clocks to vinyl steering wheels and Barbie doll feet. The whole was huge, but each piece was minuscule, and the overall effect was awesome. The Dinosaur spoke to people and secretly told them that their culture was inevitably doomed to utter extinction. No one admitted what they really felt in the work’s presence of course, that would be a bit too gloomy.

Although disappointed with the other works in the show, the public liked the Dinosaur so much that it was more than enough to ensure Darian's everlasting fame. The Dinosaur was never moved. It has remained right where it was initially exhibited unto this very day.

Darian did not travel with his work. He seems to have forgotten about it entirely, busy in his studio, cluttering up the place with every kind of useless thing that he could find. For several months, while his art travelled the globe, he devoted his time to incomprehensible experimentation concerning form and shape. He seems to have confided in absolutely no one during this period, and we can only guess that Darian was preparing himself in some way for his enormous future task.

Darian was world-renowned, materially secure, well-respected, and yet almost entirely unknown in any personal sense. An enigma, a successful one at that. Just the kind of artist that society loves to fawn on. But society didn't know what it was getting into when it picked on Darian Fark to be the avatar of its Renaissance. Some men express the essence of their age. What Darian Fark expressed was something else entirely.

PART TWO

THE TREE OF LIFE

We should begin with a general survey of the origins of the Seventh Renaissance. It should not be ignored that The Renaissance was artificially induced. In the midst of global military conflict, President Harper and his corporate advisors decided to divert attention from the conflict by launching a massive public works campaign.

The centerpiece of this jewel of central planning was the construction of an ultramodern metropolitan city. Every region of the country got its share of the public monies however. Streets were repaved, old buildings were restored, new ones were built, everyone received a piece of the illusory pie. The newspapers and other newer media played the role of cultural cheerleaders, with high-flown phrases about restoring dignity and pride to the country. Any properly cynical person could see right through the hype, but the citizens were made to believe that they were truly living through a brand new renaissance, a whole new era of the world.

We can say that painlessly today, but at the time no one would admit the obvious truth, and every line was swallowed. In any case, it was during this initial period of the renaissance that the Fourth Fidelity decided to construct its new headquarters. To complement their hideous scheme, they commissioned Darian Fark to build them a centerpiece.

The story of the Fixture covers no less than twenty four years, from the beginning to the end. This is no simple story. Instead, it is a nightmare of delay and interruption, scandal and intrigue, bankruptcy, lawsuits and strikes, tragedy and farce, confusion and interminable, impossible, unimaginable frustration.

I'll start from the beginning, which was the moment Darian Fark agreed to do the project. He presented a list of demands to the bankers. There has been a lot of controversy about the terms of this agreement, and many of its clauses are still in litigation today. Darian requested unrestricted expression of his freedom, and started the work slightly before the freedom was granted. He could never place restrictions on himself or limit the types of materials he would use. No timetable was given for completion of the work - it was never to be due at any time. Also, it was to cost no more than two point seven million dollars, adjustable for future inflation.

When the Greater Depression came along, with its incredible inflation, Fourth Fidelity was to go to court and lose, not just a lawsuit, but untold millions of dollars because of this aspect of the contract. But by that time, of course, the Fixture had already spread its wings, and left the shallow confines of the Fourth Fidelity courtyard far behind.

But perhaps the most important clause stated that there could be no restriction on the size of Darian’s construction. This was to lead to the most unforeseen and unpredictable consequences possible.

No one seems to know what Darian had in mind for this work. No sketches or designs were ever found. We only know that Darian was alleged to have said to Seraphim Jones that “this thing will be alive, and it will never die.” The authenticity of this statement has been vigorously disputed, and I don't care to express any opinion on this subject. We can legitimately doubt the words of Mr. Jones, but if we do, we have precious little else to go on.

Darian himself said nothing on the subject until he was forced to in a court of law. He prefaced everything he said in the court with “This is what I know to be true”. For now let's say the Fixture was originally a mystery to all concerned, probably even to the artist. Fourth Fidelity were hoping for another Dinosaur, the citizens hoped for something new and different, and Darian Fark was ready to embark upon the achievement of his destiny.

The first visible portion of the Fixture was unceremoniously cemented into the middle of the bank’s courtyard by Darian himself on a cold winter morning. This initial portion was a modest piece, a slab of drab gray granite, eight inches wide, twenty seven inches long, three inches high, and smooth and flat on top, except for several holes. After installing this first piece Darian left. He returned once more, the following day, to inspect the work, and then he did not appear again until mid summer of the same year.

The slab of stone became a running joke, especially among the workers at the site. They presumed that Darian had made off with two point seven million dollars for a stupid piece of rock. This was incorrect of course. Darian was busy in his studio. He isolated himself there for six months before resuming active labor at the site. He may have been designing during his studio time, but no designs remain. Speculation on his methods is fruitless. A historian is liable only to report the facts, and on this period we have no physical evidence whatsoever

He returned to The Fourth Fidelity courtyard in an old and battered pickup truck he had rented out the day before. I have the receipt on this. It is a fact. He worked alone at this time, and as he dragged three heavy iron bars into the center of the courtyard, he realized help would be required. A couple of the Fidelity workmen were glad to help him out, and even refused his offers of payment, but this was one of the last times that anybody ever did a thing for him for free. The group lifted up the bars, and put them into place, on top of spokes which fit into the holes of the slab, and everything was welded into place. He put the biggest bar on the bottom, and the other two on top, parallel to each other, horizontal to the ground.

It was not an auspicious beginning. It was an ugly and ungainly little structure, and no one knew what could possibly be coming next. As sculpture it was unoriginal and bland. As a base it looked as though it couldn't support much weight and the Fidelity workers started taking bets as to when the thing would simply fall over or crash into the bank, damaging their work.

But Darian seemed pleased enough, and left the site for three more weeks. Now, even more than in the previous months, it appeared as though the thing might be actually done. But Darian was contracting laborers, and sending bills to Fourth Fidelity, and their doubts were cleared away, their confidence restored, and the Seventh Renaissance continued unabated.

Upon Darian’s return, construction of the Fixture finally began in earnest. For the next eleven months everyone could see that something big was happening. Darian had a crew of several workers, and a fleet of trucks. The first thing to go up was a massive marble tube six feet high and three feet in diameter, with a two foot high by four foot wide hollowed 'knob' on top. A large piece of obsidian was inserted into the tube, and a black cast iron beam was welded on the uppermost right corner, extending upward more than twenty feet at a thoroughly impossible angle to remain in balance. Another cast iron beam was implanted on the other side, likewise extending upward but to the left and lower. Now, nobody had any idea just what the hell was going on. The thing was really ugly, and an eyesore too. Several gigantic bright red tubes were jutting out, all at equally impossible angles, all ultimately resting on the ridiculous little base.

By Autumn, the structure, (It wasn’t called the Fixture at this point) reached a height of twenty seven feet. A number of the plastic tubes were branching over the entire extent of the courtyard. They provided shade, or blocked the sun, depending on your point of view. The tubes were too high for anyone to bump their head on but this fact did not lessen the Fidelity’s concerns with the construction of the project. They were ultimately hoping that Darian would either change his mind and take the structure down or by some miracle it would turn into something wonderful and marvelous.

Darian didn't hear a word the critics said, or at least he didn't appear to. Gerald McGavin, who hauled materials for Darian would later testify that the artist confided in no one, and never let on just what he was intending. The work seemed totally haphazard, even accidental, as he welded here and bolted there all through the winter time, and by the following spring the thing was turned into a fountain, to the amazement and delight of all concerned.

The water followed complex and roundabout routes in returning to its source, and no one was ever able to explain the pumping system he'd installed, not even the plumbers who'd helped put it in. We can assume that Darian thought an explanation was unnecessary, but making any assumptions about Darian is probably unwise. To observers, it appeared that the work was done, in good time, and far under budget. And so one summer day, on the first anniversary of the slab, a christening ceremony was held by the Fourth Fidelity. Many notables from the art world graced the structures presence. They all pretended to admire the elegance but were undoubtedly holding contemptuous thoughts of the creator, evidenced by the venom they would later spew towards Darian as public opinion wavered. The ribbon was cut, cheers erupted from the crowd and the champagne flowed.

Darian didn't show. He wasn't answering his telephone. No one heard from him for months, then he suddenly announced that he was finally ready to begin. “It's already Done!” They told him. He still had more than two million dollars left, and no limits to his time or space to spend it on. The Fidelity were worried. They didn't want him to continue, and told him to keep the rest of the money. They were sufficiently pleased, they said, but Darian was not. He didn't want the money. He wanted to shape reality.

Darian had a vision, which he shared with the public for the first time in an interview with Donald Blake,  soon after Fourth Fidelity told him to stop.

"I have sunk the roots. If you can see with eyes unglazed by history, then you will see the implications of these roots. The rest of the work will follow naturally, as all things spring directly from their roots."

This may not have answered any questions concerning the work, but the general impression was that Darian Intended to materialize his vision. He wasn't much more specific,

"The renaissance must have a common unifying factor. What could be more common than life and growth itself?”

It is clear that all observers at the time failed to comprehend the meaning of these words. They lacked the imagination essential for understanding. How could they understand, Darian was destined to introduce the required concepts himself. At least the interview sufficed to stifle opposition, and the challenge he laid down for himself led the Fourth Fidelity to relent and he carried on. They too were curious, and they hoped he'd salvage the mess he had already made.

Darian entered his greatest period shortly after this. At the time he seemed obsessed. He was working feverishly with his blueprints, scribbles and designs, ordering materials, hiring laborers, overseeing the construction. For an entire year the Fixture grew unabated. The scene of construction was always surrounded by herds of curious spectators. The Fourth Fidelity building opened in the spring, and people watched from the windows as Darian continued his work below. The artist himself was daily at the scene, directing cranes, consulting with his crew, climbing up the fountain and hammering, pounding, sawing, welding, bolting, painting, plastering, cementing. He rarely paused to examine the work, he just knew that it would work.

He was unusually accessible to the press during this juncture. He would gladly talk about the work, but only about the pieces - never about the whole. He said it was the process that really mattered, the actual doing of the work, and that he wasn't interested in the finished product as such. He was active and open, but he wasn't exactly friendly. His attitude was the very model of sobriety, perhaps reminiscent of his youth. Those who worked beside him said he was a hard man, impossible to please, with an inexhaustible reserve of patience, even tact.

The people marveled at the sight, and the news that Darian Fark was finally working on his long-awaited masterpiece spread throughout the world, Tourists en masse visited the courtyard and the Fidelity benefited greatly from the publicity.

We called it the Tree of Life at this point and it certainly looked like one, branching ever upward, outward, downward, inward, in a multitude of colors, and made of every hard material known to man, weaving an intricate pattern of connections, intersections, overlays and parallels, a fountain flowing everywhere at once, extending to a height of more than forty seven feet, completely overshadowing the courtyard; add to this a multitude of sounds, caused by invisible levers, hammers, prongs and springs, activated by the falling water drops, in a harmony of perpetual motion and intricate subtle beauty.

Darian ran lines of Xenon lighting in crooked patterns throughout the whole huge structure. And on top of it installed a computer controlled evanescent light spectacular. The lights, the sounds, the water, all the branches, the colors and materials and the sheer size of the Tree combined to produce the most sensational effects. This was clearly the most amazing sculpture ever known to man. Construction halted one autumn day, Darian’s 27th birthday actually. And everyone thought the work was finally done. Darian gave no indication either way. He let his workers go, then headed back to his studio.

The Tree’s success was instantaneous and overwhelming. No one could find the adjectives to describe it. It had to be seen to be believed, and even seen it couldn't be believed. The Fourth Fidelity was stunned. The Tree covered the first five stories of their building, and their edifice seemed a crude and ugly primitive sort of thing in comparison. Indeed, it was.

Darian had spent nine hundred thousand dollars on his, whereas the Fidelity had spent some thirty seven million on theirs, and they were embarrassed. But they were glad that it was over, and sent some emissaries to commend him on the work, and reward him personally with a check for the balance of the funds.

But it was obvious that the Tree wasn't finished. Looking down from above, many of the branches came abruptly to a halt, and on the top there was an iron platform, ten feet square, with slots and openings intended for other pieces to fit into. So the emissaries should not have been surprised when Darian refused the check and simply stated "I'm not finished yet."

Publicly a festival was being held, a weeklong ceremony to celebrate the Seventh Renaissance and its glorious centerpiece, the Tree of Life. Darian did not attend.

Darian may have thought that there was nothing standing in the way of his work’s completion, but if so, he was wrong. The Fourth Fidelity was not amused to learn that he intended to continue with the work. Enough is enough, they said, and they filed the first of what were to be many lawsuits concerning the Fixture. Specifically, they sought a court injunction, prohibiting any further construction on their property. Darian was summoned to the court to testify. He appeared shocked and visibly upset. He asked the court to turn aside the motion, on the grounds that it was a violation of his contract. But the court ruled that the corporation had a right to control activity on its real estate, and moved to grant the bank's request. Darian asked permission to remove some items from the top of the Tree. This was the only point all parties agreed upon during the entire proceedings.

The headlines shrieked "FOURTH FIDELITY BLOCKS FARK: ARTIST FORCED TO DECONSTRUCT".

The citizens were outraged, and the Fourth Fidelity never fully recovered from this loss of prestige. But Darian was unconcerned, and set about removing the upper platform, and a few assorted branches. Overall the effect was deemed beneficial by the bank, for the top now looked complete, and approximately rounded. The scandal blew over quickly, as Darian refused to sue the Bank as many citizens suggested he should do. He had other things in mind. He withdrew into seclusion once again to contemplate the future of his Fixture.

Many still believe that the Tree of Life portion of the Fixture is its greatest part, and Darian's greatest achievement, while the rest of the monument was merely an aberration. First of all, Darian never referred to this portion by that name. Secondly, we only see it as a tree because we are expecting to, and every similar shape tends automatically to be lumped together with its most characteristic representative. This tendency overlooks the metaphorical possibilities.

But Darian customarily referred to that portion as “the original growth” or “the blueprint in the seed”, thus insinuating that this was not an end unto itself, but merely the basic material to be evolved upon. He called it “a spreading shape”, indicating its primal tendency, rather than a final goal. The implications should be clear. The misnamed Tree was intended to be the common ancestor of all the later developments, and nothing more than that. It was a symbol of primordial shape, including all potentials invisibly within it, a launching pad, the illusion of the beginning which actually never authentically begins.

At this point, Darian paid a visit to the mayor, Benjamin Wick. According to the latter's testimony, Darian asked him to negotiate with Fourth Fidelity on his behalf. Specifically, Darian said he was willing to abide by the judgment of the court concerning the bank's own property, but since the Fixture was intended as a gift to the city itself, he would like permission to continue the work on adjacent properties. Fourth Fidelity, you'll remember, was still obliged to pay one point eight million dollars toward the work, and to honor the no-limits clause of the agreement. Darian was ready to compromise. All he wanted was a final settlement with the bank, and the official support of the city to continue his work. We can wonder what might have occurred had the courts not swayed in Darian’s favor. Perhaps Darian would have continued without consent, believing in his work so much that he could not stop constructing.

Shortly after he won his case the next phase of his work began. An enormous inverted V was constructed, seventy eight feet at the apex, and landing squarely on the ground on the other side of Rambler Street, just behind a Burger Joint. It was made of the slickest plastic, coated with oily polyurethane to prevent anyone from climbing up too far. At the base, a maze of limber and cement, with hundreds of tiny passageways, too small even for rodents. Only insects and water could navigate the structure. The overall shape of this thing was a centahedron containing a hundred other hidden centahedrons within it.

Darian’s work did not go smoothly. The Burger Joint filed suit against the Fourth Fidelity and Darian Fark, citing zoning laws and alleged safety violations. Darian was undeterred. He enshrouded the monstrous thing with a mesh of mildly charged electric netting, and agreed to surround the base, including the intricate maze, with a twelve foot barbed wire hurricane fence, which he adorned with more of his impossibly soft lights. He was determined to appease all enemies, at whatever cost, provided the work itself could proceed according to his plan.

The point is that henceforth he had to fight for every inch, and the rest of the story is of his battle against an array of various opponents. He conducted this struggle in the name of art, and in the name of the Seventh Renaissance. It was a long, protracted war, but he was determined not to lose. He put the common interest above the private interests he ran up against, and his strength did not fail, his resolve never weakened, despite the ever shifting tides of public sentiment.

It must be noted that throughout these years, Darian was something of a public hero. You'd be surprised how easily many people fell for the old renaissance routine. Trained in gullibility, and ready to worship the market of the Fidelity, they were fully convinced that this period of resurgence was a genuine, spontaneous expression of a brand new generation of creative artists, rather than the empty and contrived illusion it really was. For the city’s constituents, Darian Fark was synonymous with the renaissance, and after his legal hassles with the bank, Darian was loved and adulated by the population at large. In short, he could do no wrong. Anyone who opposed him in those days was automatically vilified by the corporate-owned media , to whom he was a living symbol of both visible progress and the promised endless growth of a vivified economy. Those were free spending times.

And so, Darian was able to push through a number of extraordinary ventures, despite the legitimate complaints of rightful owners whose properties he was wantonly trespassing. Even the courts gave in to media pressure, and ruled in Darian's favor every time a business tried to sue for an injunction. The list of Darian’s plaintiffs grew long - including seven restaurants, a private law school, two major supermarkets, and a host of other, smaller, property owners and businessmen.

A detailed explanation of his work at this time shall be reserved for a later portion of the book. I must however mention a few things here. One, that Darian had a number of people working for him now, general contractors, artisan plumbers, anyone who asked and wanted to contribute. Two, inflation had begun in earnest, and due to the clause in his original contract increased his available resources. And three, Darian began to attract some criticism within the art world, mostly brining it upon himself by his increasingly vociferous and harsh attacks upon the customary standards of the day.

By way of prefacing what follows next, I'd like to mention some of Darian's profound views and theories. He believed that artificial shapes (circles, squares, etc...) had long since outlived their usefulness, that adding artificial colors to materials was wrong, that anthropomorphic use of natural shapes and creatures was insane, that any purely abstract conception was ridiculous and garbage, that sculpture as well as every art has no function but to be, no meaning other than its being, no purpose in any human manner; in short, that art has no value.

This was pretty heavy stuff, even for those times, and these views, which he frequently expressed, made him many enemies among his fellow artists. That listing of ideas will prove essential to the comprehension of the Fixture, particularly in its original, initial phase. But keep in mind that what we are discussing now is only a portion of the total work itself, which was not to be completed, if indeed it ever was, for many, many years after this brief three-year phase.

PART THREE

FIXTURE

So far we have discussed the early years of Darian Fark, and his progress through the dinosaur, the so-called Tree of Life, and the beginnings of the Fixture. But at some point along the line Darian changed, in a subtle way. And even now no one is quite sure just how to characterize his transformation. Outwardly, he appeared to be the same Darian Fark. Devoted to his work, seemingly oblivious to any other concerns, serious, sober, humorless, dry, a single-minded sculptor intent on fashioning his shapes in his own peculiar way.

We do not know if fame and popular acclaim played any role in changing him. I doubt this very much. Instead, I believe, that he reached a certain age, and suddenly saw things differently. There is evidence to support this claim; the evidence of the work itself. We cannot help but doubt, when gazing upon the dinosaur and the tree, both static and unconnected pieces, that these are the creation of the earlier Fark.Darian’s transition was quite sudden and noticeable by anyone who had been paying attention to the artist. There have been many theories concerning what may have transpired in his mind around this time. Some say that he gave up on human beings entirely, and instead of trying to teach them, he deliberately began to offend them. But this theory seems untenable, in light of the fact that he never seemed to pay attention to the citizens anyway. Neither was this change, as some suggest, a campaign of vendetta against the Fourth Fidelity.

These theories do not reach the heart of the matter at hand. Which is that he was seeing different shapes, radically and wholly different kinds of forms. Darian no longer saw the perfect, abstract shapes that govern the world of science, math and art. He no longer saw the twisted, swollen, bloated, patchy, lumpy, tattered shapes that hitherto had characterized his vision of the world. Darian had left these normal shapes behind.

He no longer saw single connections, and intersections, , as were evident in the Dinosaur, and in the Tree of Life. Darian had entered a new realm of perception, and in this realm the shapes he saw were shapes no one had ever seen before. The reason we still gape in awe and notice with bewilderment the formless forms that form the Fixture is that we have not yet learned to see these shapes. We can find no meaning to explain them, but Darian wasn't living in the world of meaning anymore, if indeed he ever was.

I will start with the first two components of the Fixture, perhaps you will understand where Darian intended to go from this. On the corner of Turner and Fourier Street stands the first work. It is connected with the Tree by means of yellow ocher cables, wrapped around the street lights, sagging in some places, while in others riding impossibly high above the street’s buildings. Following the cables, we come to rest in an alley near the corner of the mentioned streets. At the entrance to the alley, there are yellow cobble stone steps, loosely placed so as to slip when you step on them, but they are definitely secure. Carefully we ascend, and soon come to the top, where a gap awaits us. The stairs are walled behind them, and there is a ten inch gap between this wall and the oozing, rising fixture. It is an orange thing, of corian and plaster, a tube shaped totem rising thirty seven feet, squeezed between the narrow alley walls, and scribbled on, all over, by various punks and vandals. It is a long thin lump. It's sides are wary and uneven, a formless form. It doesn't look like anything at all. But from the top, some oily bluish grayish foamy gooey liquid stuff bubbles periodically over the edge, and oozes down the sides.

The Madison Paper Plant, on Bleeker near Red Alley, is enshrouded in the second work, a tomb of plastic strings, forming an uneven, tangled netting stretching high above the factory. Strings whack against the windows, dangle in the parking lot; the overall effect more like a fishing net torn open by a school of killer whales than anything I can think of. The factory owner sued, and lost; the netting stayed, but now it's merely fragments of its former self, many strings pulled off by various people for all sorts of reasons down through the years, and once somebody even tried to set the whole thing on fire, but succeeded only in burning down the factory, which is no longer there. The netting was originally made up of steel and petrifying trees. These are still in place since nobody can move them.

These are only two examples. I will discuss each component of the Fixture in due time, but for the moment I have chosen these two to illustrate some points. People at the time had no idea what to make of these constructions. They went along with the media's description of Darian as a “trailblazing pioneer” and a “forerunner of the future generations”, but at the same time they suspected that the Fixture was going to be something more than art. Darian was taking some precautions that seemed out of line.

Why was he sinking his foundations more than twenty-four feet deep?

Why was he cementing at least one side of every piece to a large important building?

Why was he attaching all these pieces to each other, sometimes by means of substances far more imposing than the works themselves?

A consensus was reached that Darian only meant to have his pieces stand the test of time. But Darian wasn't worried about the tests of time. And he wasn't protecting his Fixture against the elements, but against the very people he was supposedly building it for. Darian took advantage of his popularity. Indeed, it was his popularity that allowed him to construct. But he sensed somehow that this popularity wouldn’t last. As to whether he understood the full extent of what was yet to come, I doubt it very much. He was prepared for the inevitable, but against the unthinkably impossible, there can be no such prevention and no cure.

One of Darian's most popular pieces of the time was behind the Jolly Supermarket on the 700 block of Elbert Street. It was popular because the pundits claimed it to be. The Jolly after all was the market for the middle class and a parking lot was not a proper site for a classic work of art. We know differently now of course.

When Darian began to dig up the middle of the lot the owner of the Jolly took a legal interest in the matter. But the courts at this time were still ruling in favor of Darian, in favor of expression. Huge steel girders were sunk into the ground below the lot. These beams rose twenty feet above the ground, and were bracketed together by means of chain link fences. Beneath the surface was a generator, powered by solar panels on the top of the Fixture itself. The generator pumped a number of leather and rubber cords up and down the height of the structure. Attached to these were various lumps of rock and multicolored plastics. Weaving in and out among the elevator-ropes were miniature fossils traveling in a series of elliptic spirals, and flashing little lights like fireflies. The structure looked more like a delivery shaft filled with misplaced geological specimens than anything else that anyone could ever think of.

Between the C-D Restaurant and the Happee Bar'n'Grill, Darian installed a mound of crystalline tangeleum. Within the clear transparent walls, various lumps and waves with prong-like claws were frozen still, except that every hour the entire thing was jolted from beneath, and a shower of red and orange sparks appeared to set the things on fire. This lasted for a minute, during which time a muffled whistle could be heard like the sound of a suffocated train.

Darian's fixtures live, and this is the essential point. Even One Hundred Centahedrons supported a small colony of metallic centipedes, which still scurry in and out of all the myriad openings unstoppably and unceasingly.

On Rambler Street, near Elbert, above the Morewell Condo Complex, Darian suspended a sort of artificial cloud, which changes shape and color depending on the weather. Within the cloud, a host of little clouds also dance and metamorphose to no apparent rhythm. Thunder and lightning storms are regular events up there, constantly deceiving and consequently annoying all the residents. No one is sure how he did it, and scientists still regularly make measurements and calculate the probabilities of this thing being possible. Darian himself refused to comment on the project.

Around this time, the great inflation began. This proceeded to the Greater Depression itself, because private industries collapsed before the central government did. I am not an economist and I must look at events through the distortion as you do, so I cannot pretend to explain it all to you. Prices soared, the value of the market plummeted, businesses went down, supplies were scarce, and Darian Fark would suddenly become rich beyond all normal comprehension. He had just one hundred thousand dollars left when the depression began, but the foresight he showed in his initial negotiations with the Fourth Fidelity ballooned his worth exponentially. The courts would not exempt the Fidelity from its obligations. But the courts would look into the matter and determine the contract’s meaning in this new and possibly devastated economy.

These developments were both very good and very bad for Darian. On the one hand, he could now accomplish all the things he wanted to. On the other hand, the changing situation was also bound to change official attitudes towards the Seventh Renaissance, and towards Darian Fark himself. The Fixture would soon become a wasteful luxury, and the avid Fark would be the most visibly wasteful artist of his time. But Darian took advantage of the situation, and immediately bought a warehouse, and a huge supply of tools, materials, machines, and parts. He hired a warehouse crew, and set himself up as a private enterprise. Thus, his reliance on the Fourth Fidelity funds was at an end. He became a businessman, and proceeded about his business.

He built the twenty-story tall, left handed quadruple helix tower in the first year of the Greater Depression. To many it was his greatest work, if only because it is visible from every part of town, and even from the suburbs several miles away. Made of lead-filled tyrognesium and chrome, the helixes intercoil around a central shaft of liquid fire. The effect is of a million prisms twisted, glowing, reflecting all the light of sun and stars.

Darian always worked on several projects simultaneously, and ignored the other, irrelevant events of the day. He was busy all the time. He had no telephone now, and nobody could talk to him, unless he initiated the conversation. He lived entirely in his own world of awe-inspiring shapes, and viewed the city as his private playpen. He did not ask anyone's permission to use their property, nor did he apologize to them. He let his lawyer handle everything, and his lawyer always won. This is not the place to question his lawyer’s methods. The Seventh Renaissance was still in operation as a dominating social myth, and the powers that be were favoring the artist every time.

Part Four

Beginning of the End

At this point Darian appeared to be at his peak. He received a medal of honor from the mayor, and a commendation from the President. Renaissance fever was at full pitch.

We know what he had in mind, for the Fixture is the living substance of his thought. He was fashioning his latest works, the mountains he was shortly to install behind the Merrimack Hotel. These mountains, with their velvety green surfaces, and purple liquid valleys, their cliffs and canyons, gorges and ravines, still seem so real, it's odd to think of them as made by one man and a crew of laborers. True, they only reach a hundred feet, but one can climb them like a real range, get lost among the artificial clouds, and rest beside their sparkling waterfalls. This was one instance where the owners of the property did not complain. Instead, they changed their name to the Mountainview Hotel, and raised their rates. But Darian did not stop to admire his handiwork..

On a particularly windy day, during a severe winter storm, fortunately our weather records are quite precise, the huge inverted V, linking the Centahedron with the Tree of Life, collapsed. Fortunately it tumbled in the middle of the night, and nobody was injured, but the damage to the street and some parked autos was considerable indeed. In fact, the road was closed for several months. A number of concerned citizens organized the KEEP-OUR-STREETS-SECURE-FROM-FALLING-THINGS BRIGADE (or KOSSFFT for short) and filed a formal complaint with the city's Public Works Commission. There were no immediate results, but this was a warning sign, which Darian only slightly noticed since he immediately attempted to put his structure aright, this time with support from a number of power cables, connected to other portions of the Fixture. No matter where he built, there was always some connection with the others, and even though some of these connections have been lost, the idea of them is central to an understanding of the work.

Some contemporary critics tried to analyze his work, but they used dated concepts, and ultimately failed in the attempt. Julian Morana thought that Darian's grand work was all the infantile death wish of some primordial omnipotence, revealed most clearly in the diapers of a child. This is palpably absurd. Rene Pocussard determined from his careful observation that Darian was extrapolating fundamental principles of the post-hysterical world, that is, relief from global horror not unleashed as yet, and that the element of playful innocence was a symbol of the spiritual rebirth among the people in the aftermath of the World War, but we know Darian had no interest in that war, or any war, and was in fact oblivious to the ever-shifting manufactured public moods. David Betanchord considered that the Cone, with all its mutant pop-up beings, the Elevator Carousel with its living elements, the Centahedron and the Flaming Paperweight, the Alley Mold, the Quadruple-Helix Tower, the Spider Webbed Factory, the endless spiral bridge, the mountains, and the Artificial Cloud, and the Crawling Slime were all products of a 'magical mind' of obviously desperate escapoidism, idealism, anti-realism and reactionary sludge. But all the critics missed the point. Darian wasn't dealing in ideas - neither conscious nor unconscious ones.

He was not an intellectual, nor did he even have a point of view. He was interested in living shapes, moving, breathing, undulating shapes. You can draw your own conclusions, but the Fixture was alive, its motions were perpetual despite its forms! Despite its superficial features! One thing was common to them all organic life!! Be it primitive or advanced, Darian saw life in every shape, and respected that above all else. In the case of humans, we might say that he respected their primal living essence in spite of everything else they were. He had no use for concepts. He had no use for anything. He was a lover of life, of life itself.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, it's time to prove my above interpretation false; for the Pit, what has been referred to as his negative work, was not alive. It did not move or breathe. It was not a shape. The Pit would become his most despised work and would break the spell his works had previously held upon the public.

There was an area of the city called The Plains, between Janus Boulevard and Grove Street. For many years it served as everybody's training grounds. Baseball, football, soccer, every sort of amateur and neighborhood team practiced and played their matches in the Plains. It was a vast dirt area comprising more than seven city blocks in size. In every season, at whatever time of day, kids and grownups would be there, having fun, playing games, or just simply hanging out.

But all that changed one day when Darian arrived with two bulldozers and several of his workers. Quite unannounced, they started digging up the grounds. Day after day, people gathered in horror and surprise to watch him devastate their field. Soon there was a yawning pit in the very center of the Plains. He wouldn't answer questions. His workers didn't know what he was planning either. Even when the Mayor appeared and asked him, Darian wouldn't say. The KOSSFFT became incensed and along with various other interest groups put pressure on the mayor to do something and do it immediately.

And so the city filed suit, (not usually the quickest of responses) on behalf of everyone who lived in our fair city, against the perpetrator, Darian Fark. This was a major turning point in both Fark’s life and his work. The media now turned against him and the critics would soon have their way with Fark and his objects. Judge Harvest issued a ruling blocking any future work, not merely on the Plains, but everywhere.

Darian was not permitted to work on any public or even private property. Citing all sorts of previous suits, disruptions he had caused, complaints, and public menaces like the V, the judge declared “the time has come”, “enough is enough” and “the pillage of this city has to end right now!”

Darian was threatened with fines and even prison if he violated the court's decision. His work was thus effectively halted for a time. He would return, but by then the situation, local, national, and even international, was to be quite different, and the favorable conditions he'd enjoyed for six short years were gone, destined not to reappear. Thus one phase had ended, and the final, and ultimately decisive phase, had only just begun.

The Seventh Renaissance was dead, officially declaring bankruptcy soon after Darian’s court ruling. Some of the movements it began still lingered on for about a decade and half, as these things tend to do. The artists who rose to prominence at that time remained, in dominance right through their middle age, and as for the post-Depression youth, well, they were a different breed entirely, disdainful of mass media, avoiding the limelight and the larger-scale, and in general returning to the local small-group anarchistic forms of art that suited their mostly isolated status.

But this is not a book about the Manakin Culture, and it would be best to leave our biases aside, and continue to discuss the final remnants of the Fossil Culture, which precede our own.

All major public works constructions stopped. All urban reclamations programs stopped. The Artists Supportive Program disappeared, and even work on the city itself came abruptly to a halt. This was no time for wasting any funds, for there were no funds remaining to be wasted.

Popular opinion was recast overnight, and Darian Fark was no longer the city's local hero, but a kind of man-made pest, an artist-Frankenstein, who had to be restrained by every means available, and especially by the law. Editorials demanded the removal of many of his sculptures. But the government could not afford to do it. And the citizens were more concerned with their daily bread at the time.

Instead, the press was satisfied that Darian would be prevented from committing any further acts of public display. But they underestimated him, in several different ways. In the first place, they hadn't counted on his legal expertise. Nor did they realize just how much money and materials he still had in his warehouse. And finally, they didn't reckon on the fact that in a time of general unemployment, Darian had a labor force that he could pick and choose from. Needless to say, of course, they also didn't know just how incredibly determined Darian was. They thought one victory in the courts would be enough, but they were very wrong.

Darian bought an abandoned Burger Joint at Winding Road and Fortune, and, blatantly flouting the court order, proceeded to demolish it. In September he began to build his most imposing structure yet. It was a replica of several bombed-out buildings, abstracted from a photograph of Dresden. He didn't build the edifices first and then demolish them. No, he built them as they were - already destroyed. In my own special field, this uncompleted work remains the most important architectural feat of that entire decade. He had a host of laborers, and the site was always swarming with activity, as hundreds of others waited at the gates, hoping to be hired. The Mayor brought the Zoning Commission to bear against him, but he ignored their orders. And then the city put pressure on the unions of the building trade until Darian’s workers were forced to strike.

Darian immediately hired scabs, and went on with the work. There were fights and riots almost daily, as strikers hurled rocks and even dynamite at Darian and his crew. The police stood by and watched, as the intentionally demolished structure quickly became more demolished every day. If Darian ever had a sense of irony, it must have certainly struck him then. No one today can doubt that our city saw a war, and that mass of shell-like edifice was its end result.

After about a month, the police began arresting Darian's non-union workers, and that was most effective in discouraging others to replace them. Soon after that, Darian himself was put in jail, on charges of obstructing justice and creating a public nuisance. No one could deny the justice of the latter charge, although some of us might say that art-as-public-nuisance was exactly what the situation called for.

Darian spent two days in jail before authorities let his lawyer bail him out. He was ordered not to go on with the work, and this time he obeyed. Instead, Darian withdrew to his warehouse, now entirely alone, and began construction of his greatest projects. These would occupy the next twelve years of Darian's life, and would ultimately prove worthwhile. If he'd left them in his studios, to be discovered later on, perhaps the ending of his story would be very different. But Darian wanted them to be displayed, and within his lifetime, because of his conviction that his art was not finished product merely, but an essential part of his life and times, and of all of those around him.

I will focus on the first four works of this phase for the moment. Then I will return to discuss the other contemporary events that accompanied their placements in the city. Of these, the aqueduct was the first that he constructed, and potentially the most important of them all. It was a rambling thing, made of rubber, plastics, woods and various soft stones, which eventually linked almost all the pieces of the Fixture in a network of sky sculpture, the likes of which does not exist on any planet anywhere. In his own time, the aqueduct was useless, but now we use it since the water from the river is most hopelessly polluted.

Perhaps Darian foresaw this eventuality, for the aqueduct was so constructed as to form an integral portion of each piece which it connected. It could not be used at all, if it were severed from the various works. It's much too complicated for me to attempt a thorough description, and several plumbing experts still insist the damned thing cannot work at all, and yet it does, for which we are most grateful.

The Colossus of Seventh Avenue is a giant lump on three legs straddling the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Morrisey, every side is polished, shaped and zinced to reflect sunlight completely, an infinitely complex eternal show of lights shine around the thousand sides of this odd thing, while on the legs, the trademarked Darian slimes ooze up and down, circling between the 'toes' and rising to the 'waist' of the giant.

The Forest covers a large part of Blue Highway next to Bank Street. Made exclusively of wood, these bent, denuded, artificial trees rise sixty feet into the air, and take up an acre and a half, where a parking lot for the Fairgrounds used to be. Darian planted them with lead-filled ceradium shafts into an undersurface grid of intersecting iron bars. It turns out that this closely meshed grid serves as unintentional protection against the rising toxin-filled marsh waters underneath, which are forced back downward to the river. On the surface, though, the Forest is impenetrable. Not even the smallest children can squeeze through the narrow gaps between the trees. Instead, a variety of mechanical proto-beings roam around inside, occasionally peeking out, or swinging from the trees, but usually invisible to humans. The upper branches are in fact sophisticated windmills, which power everything inside. They were recently used as a model for a major urban power plant, patent proceeds going to the Fark Memorial Museum, located in what was Darian's warehouse.

And then there is the Desert. This is an empty lot, filled with sand and precious little else. This has become a no man’s land because, for reasons forever unknown, the temperature of the surface is so hot that humans cannot stand it. Curiously, none of this heat escapes from the perimeter of the Desert, and none rises more than seventy feet high, and no one can explain this either. Indeed, we all know it's impossible.

We can see by now that Darian was imagineering a thoroughly other worldly landscape, within the confines of a modern, temporal city. This was not, as many critics suggest, just another futuristic pipe dream, nor even a kind of alternate reality. It was neither science fiction nor utopian fantasy.

We must not forget that this was Darian's vision of the existing world, as he saw it. This calls for some interpretation. And fortunately, at this point, we can do more than merely guess. For Darian left some notes behind about this very subject. Let me quote from them at length,

"They don't know where things come from, but they accept them all. They think they are entitled. They don't know how things work, but they use them just the same, and think that they enjoy them. They take whatever comes to them, and accept any explanation as the truth."

"Here is a living gadget, with no visible means of support or energy source. Yet, who can deny, it lives?" Many commentators have seized on this as proof of Darian's fundamentally religious inspiration. Yet he's clearly talking of a gadget, that is, a manmade thing, not man as made by God.

"Somewhere, a common link. But no, the link is everywhere, is everything."

“It's impossible to just sit down and do something all at once and get it over with. It would be easier that way, but there's always something else to do, someone else intruding, you never know what's next. Sometimes it seems unthinkable that anything ever gets done at all.”

“It'll be done in no time. Now, you and I know it isn't true, but you can tell them anything. They believe what they want to believe. Doesn't everyone? It might be right in front of your nose but you won't see it till you believe in it.”

These quotes might help explain the final portions of the Fixture, final in the sense that they were Darian’s last works. This period of work takes us through the Greater Depression and beyond. They took so long to construct because Darian was working practically alone, building everything, operating all the trucks, machines and cranes. He could only do them one step at a time, and during all his efforts he was actively harassed and even hindered.

Darian was variously hit by hurled objects, battered and bruised, assaulted in the night; once his leg was broken and his head was smashed with glass. Through it all he labored, more determined, perhaps, than ever before. The media editorialized against him, while barely stopping short of condoning these attacks. The police would not protect him. He was warned,  “Don't go outside, and if you do, don't bring your garbage with you”. No one really understood this hate campaign, but even children screamed obscenities at him as he passed by, while their parents chuckled and encouraged them.

He was left without a friend, if he ever had one. His lawyer ran away, with an undisclosed amount of cash. His previous admirers turned into active detractors. He was no longer honored, or even welcomed, in the homes of various important persons. Darian didn't seem to mind. He did not complain. He didn't talk to anyone. He persevered, as only Darian knew how, and built the forest, tree by tree, and built the desert, truckload at a time. He built the aqueduct at night, and the Colossus was installed in several pieces during the course of one Memorial Day weekend. People jeered him as he worked, and threw anything they could find. His sites were always picketed by unions, who claimed that he was violating the law by doing everything himself. Darian worked steadily, and was deaf to all harassment.

During this period, sabotage was probably Darian's greatest problem. No portion of the Fixture remained unscathed. Some of the vandals were children having fun, while some were merely restless youth, roaming through the city on the summer holidays. But the vast majority of them were fully responsible adults who took no real pleasure in their actions, except a sort of moral righteousness, and the stupid pride of doing a necessary job. We know that nobody was ever arrested or prosecuted for tampering with the works. It was a conspiracy from the highest level, a thing impossible to understand without a study of mass politics and propaganda techniques.

As the renaissance itself was sponsored by the men and women in power, so too the anti-renaissance followed their directions. Darian became a target for every sort of group that desired an enemy. From the left, the middle and the right, the highbrow and the low, the pro and anti this or that and every other type of political faction, Darian was subject to attack and personal vilification. It is clear that little of this had anything to do with Darian himself, and everything to do with everybody else.

Everyone who ever sued him sued again. It was officially open season on the artist. Everyone whose property he'd built on or near to sued, everyone who'd ever worked for him, or had relatives who had, everybody who had ever had any dealings of any kind with him, or knew someone who did, sued Darian Fark, and won. Among these suitors was the Fourth Fidelity, and eventually, the courts ruled that Darian's initial contract was illegal, specifically the clause that pegged his income to the historical inflation rate, and therefore Darian owed the Fidelity ninety seven billion dollars. Darian lost one court case after another, until he owed a trillion dollars to a thousand different plaintiffs. This seems ludicrous from afar but we can never fully understand the times that past citizens live in, how they were affected by the environment they existed in. The courts impounded his warehouse, and Secured it with armed guards. It looked like everything was over, but Darian wasn't finished yet.

Darian had to move into the Mountainview Hotel. All of the decade’s events had finally caught up to him. Darian’s neighbors at the hotel are our only connection to the artist during this period. Our only reflection, however distorted, of Darian’s thoughts, his state of mind. Many of his neighbors report that Darian seemed “sad”, “preoccupied” and “burdened”.

My own guess is that he thought most frequently about the way to get things going again, running through the possibilities in his mind, and considering courses of action. He was treated deferentially by his neighbors in the building, who spared him all the pains of having to go outside and face the hostile world. For one particularly sentimental account of these years, see "My Idol, My Guest", by Marion Berkenstein, of room seven twenty one. There is no surviving correspondence, since Darian didn't write letters, and no records of the occasional visits he must have had from international admirers. In fact, aside from the memoirs of these fellow residents, we have no evidence at all that Darian Fark was even alive during this time. If he did work at all, nothing of his efforts have survived. I find it difficult to imagine an idle Fark, but all reports suggest that Darian did nothing during those years.

Of all the phases in his life, this one is the most impossible for me to understand. I cannot reconcile the Darian Fark I’ve come to know with this vision of a beaten man, alone in exile in a hotel room, staring at the walls, or watching television, or nurturing a pet canary like Mrs. Berkenstein reveals he did. I can only think that outwardly he seemed like that, while deep within the wheels were slowly turning, preparing Darian for yet another round of active life.

As an interpreter, I guess I'm not much help. Since I can't know who he was in that critical period, I'm afraid I really can't explain the rest too well, for there really isn't very much left to tell. Darian made a comeback eventually after a few years in the hotel. What made this possible was a legal trick, allowing him to visit his warehouse once again, during which visit he arranged to steal whatever was left of his materials and tools. It is a sordid story of bribery and corruption, and does not make anyone look good. Nevertheless, he made off with the goods, and for the next few years he did whatever he could, despite persistent illnesses, periodic court injunctions, more legal suits, more sabotage, more personal attacks. Darian’s glory years were long since over, and were almost entirely forgotten, as was the Seventh Renaissance.

It was almost as if he was operating by instinct at this point. He had most definitely aged. More than forty now, he looked more like seventy. He still had his strength, born from his inhumanly resolve, but his face was stern and shrinking, his eyes were dull and fading. His hair was mostly gray by then, and his voice was never heard above a whisper. I can describe these things, but who can say what such a life was like?

Who can feel the things he felt?

Who can get inside another human being and really tell that story?

In his last days, Darian occupied himself by filling in the spaces. The Fixture covers sixty-four square blocks, and even where there is no major piece, there are still connections, links, and smaller pieces, which I have not described. The pieces of this final period were the final links, and as such they weren't nearly as impressive as the other, earlier, more inspired portions.

The so-called 'Leaping Leopards' are brightly spotted mounds, bounding on invisible springs, perpetually in motion over on Bleeker Street, near May 6th Avenue.

The Mirror Lake on Elbert is a product of his landscape, a pool of artificial water rippling in a variable mechanical breeze. 'Flagpole Junction' is a criss-cross of remnant twisted metal poles, stacked on angles in a teepee pile. The 'Infinite Raindrop' falls perpetually from atop a brick and mortar column, always slipping, falling over the edge, but never managing to fall completely off.

'Twister' is a miniature dust tornado, created by the vacuum caused by three small walls at narrow, intrusive angles. 'Rising', a ball of liquid wax seems to climb a leaning tower of concrete blocks, but inch by inch, it always seems to rise, and yet it never makes it to the top. No one has ever seen it moving down. 'Dead Pendulum’ is a minor work, one of Darian's last, which completely contradicts the law of gravity, and disproves centuries' worth of science. A block of ice exists on March and Bank, and never melts. Above, below, and in between them all, a final, complex, intricate webbing network forms a sky wide shield of thoroughly transparent stuff. The Fixture was finally completed, at least as finished as it could be, and Darian stopped at last, after sealing the final web strand to the exit sign on the highway leading out of town.

The last connections, the strands connecting each piece of the Fixture to every other piece were strengthened. Their bonds meant to last for ages.

EPILOGUE

Darian seems to have internalized one main belief and then somewhere along his life rejected it. Darian quite often remarked, “If God wants something done, why doesn't he do it himself, and leave our things alone.”

Mrs. Fark may have had the most profound impact on the lad, whose earliest experiments must have been attempts to figure out just what the hell his mom was trying to do with those paper bags. Most critics believe that Darian failed to ever answer this, his earliest and most important question. His own life was thoroughly confused with this pursuit, and his obsessive artwork was more an exploration of his mother's hidden self than a conscious expression of his own.

Darin's need to create was explosive, uncontainable, and contagious. He could not have resisted this internal demand, even had he tried. He was forced not only to create, but to create only what he had to, and to display his works to the largest possible audience.

The effects of Darian's works were magical and subtle, and usually misunderstood, and were also strangely irresistible. His was a public art, but he was essentially a private man, and the conflict stemming from these facts were to complicate his life, and cause his greatest failures.

The Fixture covers the city. It spreads out upon the waters and the highway and the streets, on every corner and on every road in the downtown area of our city. What began with one mere Tree has spread to cover everything. Darian's achievement is unparalleled in history, and yet, when he completed it, he was a villain, a pariah, scorned, despised and ridiculed, a symbol of contempt. And that is all there is to say about the life of Darian Sebastian Fark. He spent his last days in his room, with a very large collection of plain brown paper bags, folding them into shapes of nonexistent-animal masks. Mrs. Berkenstein had to feed him after he had a stroke, and soon after that, Darian passed away.

He left behind, in his room, more than a thousand sculpted paper bags, and on his bathroom walls, a tiny finger-painted fresco, of swirling colors, complicated forms and layered textures, a masterpiece of mindless art that only Darian's mother could have ever hoped to understand. Mrs. Berkenstein recalls his final words were "Let them try, I'd like to see them try". He smiled, he closed his eyes, he died.

Darian was one of those rare human beings who know exactly who they are, and can never, under any circumstances, allow themselves to be somebody else.

INTERPRETER’S REMARKS

I'd like to talk about the work. In terms of modern architectural mythology, nothing comes close to the ultimate transcendence expressed in the Fixture as a whole. Darian's genius was not just ahead of his time, but possibly ahead of all time, as far as humans are concerned. Buildings never meant for occupants, natures inhospitable to life, and yet supporting it, the ultimate control, yet ultimately uncontrollable. The Fixture was alive and like all living things, it had to struggle to exist.

Darian presents us with the world we have made. I do not intend to now interpret every work, nor even offer you a final version of my theory of his vision. You should be left with things to think about, and I only want to give a final prompt. One man, materializing his own visions, managed to impose a set of wholly alien concepts upon an alternately welcoming and hostile world. Despite his temporal affairs, Darian Fark succeeded in doing something everyone can ultimately succeed in. He lived his life the only way he could, he did only what he could, and everything he could. Darian saw nothing but symbols in everything, and he saw everything in nothing.

Generations come and go. The Seventh Renaissance has long since passed, and we, the people of today, are subject to the standards and the pressures of our present world. Among these standards is the celebration of the possible, which recognizes nothing alien or outcast, which embraces every style, and admires everything of courage and endurance. I believe that Darian Fark, in ways perhaps he couldn’t even understand, helped us realize this.