What I Loved

once, he no longer knew where he was. He turned around and tried to retrace his steps, but not a single clearing, rock, or tree seemed familiar to him anymore. Finally, he made his way out of the woods and found himself on a hill looking down at a house and a meadow. He saw a car and a garden, but he recognized nothing. Several seconds passed before he understood that the view was of his own house and garden and his family's dark blue automobile. When he told me the story, he shook his head and said that he had never forgotten the moment, that for him it illustrated the mysteries of cognition and the brain. He called it uncharted territory and followed up the story with a lecture on neurological devastations that leave their victims unable to recognize anything or anyone.
    Years after my father died, I had a similar experience in New York. I was meeting a colleague who teaches in Paris for a drink in the bar of his hotel, and after asking a clerk for directions, I found myself walking down a long shining corridor with a marble floor. A man in an overcoat was striding toward me. Several seconds passed before I realized that the man I had taken for a stranger was my own reflection in a mirror at the end of the hall. Such brief intervals of disorientation aren't uncommon, but they interest me more and more, because they suggest that recognition is far more feeble than we suppose. Only a week ago, I poured myself what I imagined was a glass of orange juice, but it was milk. For several seconds, I couldn't say that it was milk I had tasted, only that the juice was disgusting. I like milk very much, but it doesn't matter. All that matters is that I expected one thing and got another.
    The bewildering estrangement of such moments, when the familiar turns radically foreign, isn't merely a trick of the brain but a loss of the external signposts that structure vision. Had my father not lost his way, he would have recognized his family's house. Had I known there was a mirror in front of me, I would have seen myself immediately, and had I identified the milk as milk, it would have tasted like itself. During the year that followed Bill's death, I continually found myself at a loss—either I didn't know what I was seeing or I didn't know how to read what I saw. Those experiences have left their traces in me as a nearly perpetual disquiet. Although there are times when it vanishes altogether, usually I can feel it, lurking beneath the ordinary activities of my day—an inner shadow cast by the memory of having been completely lost.
    It is ironic that after spending years thinking through the historical conventions of painting and how they influenced perception, I found myself in the position of Dürer drawing a rhinoceros from hearsay. The artist's famous creature bears a strong resemblance to the real animal, but he got a number of crucial bits wrong, as did I when it came to reconstructing the people and the events that were a part of my life that year. My subjects were human, of course, and therefore notoriously difficult to get right, perhaps impossible, but I made a number of errors that were grave enough to qualify as a false picture.
    The difficulty of seeing clearly haunted me long before my eyes went bad, in life as well as in art. It's a problem of the viewer's perspective— as Matt pointed out that night in his room when he noted that when we look at people and things, we're missing from our own picture. The spectator is the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas, the zero. I'm only whole to myself in mirrors and photographs and the rare home movie, and I've often longed to escape that confinement and take a far view of myself from the top of a hill—a small "he" rather than an "I" traveling in the valley below from one point to another. And yet, remove doesn't guarantee accuracy either, although sometimes it helps. Over the years, Bill had become a moving reference for me, a person I had always kept in view. At the same time, he had often eluded me. Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.
    But most people aren't comfortable with ambiguity. The job of piecing together a picture of Bill's life and work began almost immediately after his death with an obituary in the New York Times. It was a rather long and muddled