Laboratory
Chapter 5 of Gaze, written by Matt Boothman after Yanahn
Occasionally, very occasionally, a scientist is discovered in the Tower of Art. They tend to struggle with the experience more than other visitors, especially at first: strangely willing to deny the evidence of their eyes, determining instead to experiment and verify and get to the bottom of the situation. They tend to miss the point of the things the tower shows them, or not to appreciate their value. Still, while they’re rare and not entirely welcome visitors, they are not unheard of within the tower’s walls. And because the tower contains all that is art and nothing that is not art, it cannot be denied that at least some scientists are also artists, and at least some science is art. This is a scientific argument, unbefitting the Tower of Art; or it would be, if science could not sometimes be art; QED.
This is to explain why there is an alchemical laboratory in the Tower of Art; to answer the question that entered Willis Winter’s mind as he found himself there, though not to answer it for him.
There was no scientific laboratory or apparatus in the Tower of Art, until there was; which alteration to the fabric of the place necessitated a reluctant admission that something heretofore treated as an absolute had, in fact, been an assumption all along.
There had never been a pornographer in the Tower of Art, until Willis Winter washed up on the shores of the ink floods.
And now he was in the laboratory, was he? Another space drawn with a different visitor in mind. The grain of the workbench, the delicately echoing outlines of double-hulled glass alembics, finely etched, charged with oakgall ink and stamped firmly onto the space. It was as good a place as any for Willis Winter to occupy himself while the dust that remained of Kimya’s pots slowly settled to the floor of the pottery, and the shade of her that lingered in the tower remained only that and nothing more, and could neither mourn nor remake what Winter had destroyed.
A glazed green eye, the closest Kimya had ever come to a classical self-portrait, lay in two pieces, one on its right shelf, one on the floor, cracked through the pupil, and Willis Winter was unstoppering glass jars and sniffing the contents.
A pot Kimya had teased into a shape she had often imagined, but that could only be realised here, because it was art and so must be realised here, however impossible it was to shape from the baser clay of the world beyond the walls, had been reduced to a projectile and thence to crumbs, some still embedded in the rough plaster of the wall, and Willis Winter was leafing intently through an alchemical manual the size of a flagstone.
The laboratory had been printed well, and had hardly faded. Many of thing the things preserved there were breakable: glass flasks and stems, earthenware jars of powders, wooden furniture made brittle by acidic fumes. There were burners, and a bonfire’s worth of books. Winter had spent some time here – who knew quite how long; long enough for the destruction of Kimya’s great work to start sinking in, becoming less a thing that was burning, more a thing to be mourned – unsupervised, unshepherded, mostly unobserved. And he had destroyed nothing.
Most likely the brute considered the scientific apparatus too functional, not beautiful enough to be worth smashing. He had intuited that it would cause too little pain for his purposes.
The leatherbound manual was open to an engraving: a detailed diagram of human anatomy. Inaccurate, untrue, reflecting a point of view rather than representing objective reality; art, in other words. Winter had dwelled similarly on anatomy in school. In figure drawing manuals. In biology textbooks. Poring over the unclothed bodies he would one day direct to paw at one another.
Although, viewed scientifically – dispassionately – objectively – could it truly be said that Willis Winter gawked or leered at the man illustrated in the engraving? At that lovingly outlined jaw? Even at that meticulously shaded cock? Winter had never sniggered at those nude studies or coldly presented photos. And that had made him the target of sniggers himself: look, Willy’s staring at the tits and bums and cocks and he’s not even having a laugh, he must be some sort of pervert. Willy boy loves willies. He had not ogled, and did not ogle now. Could what he paid the unashamed man in the manual be mistaken for anything other than appreciation?
When provoked, Willis Winter was capable of causing devastation. Given space, he was capable of appreciation. Perhaps that ought to afford him a certain amount of respect.
For the man. Not for his profession. Obviously. Certainly.
Winter was scrutinising the engraver’s linework, close enough to kiss the fancifully labelled anatomy: the organ of reflection, the organ of shadow self, the organ of inward passage. Cross-references to recipes, spells, artifacts, related to the stimulation or suppression thereof. Herbs to smoke to flutter open the inner eye. The obsidian mirror that allows the self and the shadow self to separate and communicate. The stone that, carried down into the still depths, transmutes the body to the purest astral form. All fictions, as it had turned out, however factual the author had once considered them to be. All art. All, therefore, present and possible here, in the Tower of Art.
Winter heaved the tome closed and tested its heft. So. Not only a vandal, but a thief. But when he left the laboratory, he was grudgingly allowed to keep hold of the tome: a mark of wary respect.
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