Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll Read Free Book Online Page B

made the point somewhere that we must learn to distinguish between the occult and the religious, between magic and true spirituality. The two do sometimes come together—saints do have magical powers, sure. But they don’t exploit these powers, and more important, they consider them only by-products of their real concern, which is spiritual development.
    Let me tell you one last Venasque story. When I was well again and he was preparing to return to his home in Los Angeles, he still hadn’t mentioned his fee. So I asked. He told me the normal charge was five thousand dollars, but because I was a famous architect, he’d rather I design a new kitchen for his house. The one he had was both old and too full of sad memories of the happy days he’d spent there together with his wife.
    “Now it’s your turn to figure me out, Harry. Decide what kind of environment I should have.”
    “Is this part of my therapy?”
    “No. I need a new kitchen and it’ll be a good way for you to get started again. Something small and tasty!”
    I went down to L.A. with him to look at his house, but wasn’t impressed by what I saw. The place itself was postwar, pseudo-Spanish, but the greater cause for concern was the interior: ghetto-chic, shag-rug hell. Too many colors, too many patterns, too many different textures of furniture that didn’t go together at all. It looked like a schizophrenic from Tahiti lived there, or someone wildly enthusiastic for variety, but color-blind down to the difference between blue and yellow.
    Worse, with great pride Venasque said his wife had decorated the house and he hadn’t changed a thing since she died.
    The kitchen was no different. The touching thing was it looked and felt like the favorite, most lived-in room of his whole house. It was easy to envision the two old people in there, one leaning up against the fridge while the other bustled around, getting their meal ready. I could understand why he wanted me to change its too-familiar face.
    “How do you want it, Venasque? Sexy? Mediterranean?”
    “What’s a sexy kitchen?”
    “White. Silver. Sleek.”
    “Sounds like an operating room. I don’t take out tonsils here, Harry. Make me something nice and alive.”
    I’d designed buildings that, even on paper, shamed every other structure in the neighborhood both in look and stature. Houses, skyscrapers, factories … the gamut. But coming up with a dumb twelve-foot kitchen for the old man was a real pisser. I wanted to give him my very best in return for all he’d done. When I told him that, he patted my face and said, “Just make sure to leave room for the microwave.”
    First I thought Adolf Loos. Venasque would like the Loos style, wouldn’t he? Clean simplicity that went right to the heart of the matter. I showed him pictures but he shook his head. “I’d get cold in a
house like that, Harry. The man forgot to use his heart.” Out went the king of twentieth-century Viennese architecture. Ditto Gaudi was “too crooked,” and Frank Gehry’s work looked like “the fence around the schoolyard.”
    And what did the shaman think of Harry Radcliffe’s work?
    “Some of the buildings are beautiful, but others look like a lightbulb that’s been left on during the day, or a telephone ringing in an empty apartment.”
    Besides being hurt, I had no idea what he was talking about—lightbulb? Empty apartment? Later I discovered the line came from Cocteau’s journals, literally word for word. But that was no help in deciphering what he meant. Only later, when I was in Saru and looking at the proposed site for the dog museum, did it come clear: You can always fill space with form, but it’s like filling an empty room with light, i.e., what good does it do if the light has no real purpose? Or there’s no one to hear the phone’s message? He never said it, but I’m sure Venasque thought I’d clevered my way to prominence while, along the way, forgetting (or consciously neglecting) to use what