He, For One, Did Not Need the Blood of Those Who Loved Him

by Kevin MacNeil

The old man who lived next door said he saw people in 'more than five dimensions'. He also said that we have more than five senses. I was a kid and didn't know what to believe. In Gaelic, we have 'an dà shealladh' - 'the two sights', better known as 'the second sight'. So I asked the old man if that is what he meant - seeing a body of mourners winding their way through the village a week before someone dies, that kind of thing. There was a war going on, and many young men were dying.

He shook his head.

I tried a different tack. 'What do you mean by more than five senses, then? Miss MacDonald said we have' - and I counted these off on my fingers - 'taste and touch and sight and hearing and smell.'

We were sitting on an old wooden bench out the back of his croft-house. He turned, raised the pipe in his right hand up to his mouth, clamped it between his few teeth and brought his hand down swiftly and shoved me hard sideways, pushing my scrawny body right off the bench.

I fell to the ground, outrage flushing my cheeks before the ground punched me in the hips and hands and side. 'Ow!' I yelled, as much for attention and anger as pain.

Flushed with adrenalin, I sprang to my feet. He looked me in the eye, removed his pipe and said, 'Are you telling me your sense of balance doesn't exist?'

That shook me more than the fall. My anger vanished. I think my mouth gaped for a few seconds as I stared at him, unblinking. I sat on the bench in slow-motion.

'What have you learned, a bhalaich?'

'Uh, that your sense of balance is...a sense.'

He smiled and nodded, puffed some smoke out. 'And what else?'

'Not to believe Miss MacDonald?'

He laughed. 'Och, she means well. I have a painting of her underway somewhere.'    

I thought he said a painting of her underwear and was going to be brave enough to ask if I could see it though I was not truly sure whether I was brave enough to see Miss MacDonald's drais. But right then his face grew serious and he said, 'What did you use to learn what I just taught you?'

I couldn't answer his question. I don't remember much more of that conversation, except that I was frustrated not to be able to give a good reply, and it left me tossing and turning in bed that night. In fact, the question stayed with me for decades because I recalled it years later on a robust Buddhist retreat in the Kandyan hills. 'Buddhism,' said the monk, 'shows us that the mind is one of the senses.' That hit me, but is not really what this story is about.

Maybe a week after the old man pushed me off the bench I was back visiting him. It was stormy outside, so we were in his sparse living room, a clock ticking loudly on the mantelpiece above a blazing fire. His living room was almost empty. I wondered how he passed the time when I wasn't around. He must be so...bored.

'What do you do all day?' I blurted.

'What does yourself do?' he said.

'I go to school. Play football. Go fishing.'

'You think I haven't done all those things?'

'But what do you do?' It made my mind into a painful, empty thing to picture him sitting in that dismal room all day with a clock ticking and nothing happening. (Not long after this I realised my parents sent me to his house not only to give them a break but to ease the old man's loneliness, and a long time after that I realised no, it was because the old man gave me infinitely more than I gave him).

'It must be so boring,' I said, annoyed by his silence, 'sitting around all day doing nothing.'

'Oh, I would hardly say I do nothing.'

I was a bit bragail - cheeky - and said, 'Smoking your pipe doesn't count.'

'Does capturing a person's essence count?'

'What's a person's essence?'

He paused. 'You can't explain it in words.'

'How then?' I whined.

At last he said 'Ceart,' sighed and stood up. 'Trobhad. Come on.'

He led me through to his bedroom - and there, to my astonishment was Miss MacDonald. On a big wooden table.

Not in person. A painting of her. A much younger version of her. Now, in retrospect I can see that Miss MacDonald was a lonely, unhappy and, I think, anxious person. Certainly, she had a drink problem. And she was what was then known as a spinster, a word you don't hear so much nowadays. On more than one occasion she arrived to class very late; we were making a racket, which died down as we became aware that Miss MacDonald was standing in the doorway with an incongruous and unconvincing grin, waving at us like somebody signalling a wilful bull to change direction. There were other things. The way her handwriting was sometimes immaculate, but just as often misbehaved. Her acrid perfume, I now see, had a practical purpose.

But there she was in painted form - not just in how she looked, but something else about her. Miss MacDonald sits there - present tense because at the time of writing (1975) I still own the painting; the old man, with typical prescience, left it to me in his will. In the top right is his name and the date on which he painted it (1900). Miss MacDonald is hunched over a table which has a blue bottle and a glass, strongly suggesting an alcoholic drink. And indeed an alcoholic. Miss MacDonald is at once hugging and protecting herself. Her left hand rests under her chin - perhaps not so much propping her head up as unconsciously stroking her chin as one does when deep in contemplation.         

She looks as though she is ruminating, almost scheming, but I don't think it's quite that. I am more persuaded that she is either reliving a memory or running through her mind some vivid possibility, a lucid daydream. Her hair is fixed in its usual uncompromising bun with sideburn-like embellishments, but is black as outer space whereas when I was a child it was as grey and forlorn as slush. The drink has made her unself-conscious, for the body language and the expression on her face seem private. That is what makes the painting so vivid and lifelike. It offers up Miss MacDonald's...essence.

Miss MacDonald was, at the time I saw the picture, in her 60s (and looked, to my boy eyes, so much more ancient than that). The old man showed me this painting when I was about eight or nine years old, which would have been some time in the early 1940s. I remember how Mum and Aunty Ciorstag and my cousin Murdigan and I would gather round a wireless radio most evenings in Donnie Brainy's house and listen to a man with a posh accent describe the unimaginable killings of World War Two.

So, a little over four decades had passed since the old man painted Miss MacDonald. A few things occurred to me: he was a gifted painter, not just, as I have increasingly learned, a wise teacher who planted slow, slow seeds in my mind; Miss MacDonald's essence was still evident after all this time; I never grasped what he had meant when he described the picture as 'underway' forty years after he'd painted it; I truly believed, and still do, that the old man could indeed see people's invisible dimensions.

In the late 1950s I went to Aberdeen University. Being shy of the city meant I spent most of my time in the library or the pub. And one day I was mooning around the library when I picked up a book from the art section. I wasn't studying art, but I was bored of staring at dense theology texts and wanted to look at something easy on the eyes. I absently picked a book from a shelf and flicked through it. I can still feel that large cold hardback book in my hands. It fell open on the very image the old man had painted of Miss MacDonald. The entire room collapsed, telescoped in on itself. You could have knocked me off a bench with a feather!

I may even have physically gasped, because some students at nearby carousels shushed me. But anyone would have made a noise of surprise. That painting was hanging in my lodgings in Diamond Street and I knew its every nuance. Here it was in the book, every detail of the picture, from the bright, tempting blue of the bottle to the sadder, darker blue of Miss MacDonald's dress, reproduced exactly. Every detail except one. For where it should have been signed by my old, now deceased, neighbour and friend, it offered, like an insult, the name of Picasso instead. And whereas I knew it as 'Portrait of Miss MacDonald, 1900', this book claimed it was called 'Femme au café (Absinthe Drinker)' and that it had been painted in 1901-02. My mind reeled.

I tried to understand what had happened here. Did one of the most famous - and, I learned, notorious - of modern artists somehow encounter a crofter from the Outer Hebrides in 1900 or 1901? Had the old man next door lied to me?

I checked the book out of the library and ran home.

Two new areas of investigation opened up in my life that day. One was instigated by the book, the other by what I discovered on the back of the painting.

The book catalysed an exploration - I almost wrote an 'interest' - in Picasso's life. I had no interest in this man whom I conceived from the beginning as an imposter, a fraud. The more I learned of him the less I liked him. I leave aside any analysis of the quality of his paintings (other than to say that there is obviously at least one of 'his' works I have loved since I was a little boy, a painting that has played a meaningful role in the narrative of my life).

As a human being, Picasso was a misogynist, an egotist and a sadist. His own grand-daughter said of him: 'He needed the blood of those who loved him.' Notice she didn't say 'of those whom he loved'. He loved himself. A rich and powerful man, he kept the women in his life poor and dependent. He demanded human sacrifices (dignity, love, life itself). Of the seven most significant women in his orbit, he drove two mad and two to suicide.

He took.

The old man next door gave. He freely planted subtle seeds. His was a more brilliant genius than Picasso's, for it lacked ego, it existed for the greater good. As an example, look at what he wrote in pencil on the back of the painting, which I discovered when I unframed it in my Aberdeen lodgings, manically searching for clues:

"What appears is the dependent. How it appears is the fabricated. Because of being             dependent on conditions. Because of being only fabrication. The eternal non-existence of the     appearance as it is appears; that is known to be the perfected nature, because of being             always the same. What appears there? The unreal fabrication. How does it appear? As a dual     self. What is its nonexistence? That by which the nondual reality is there."

                Trisvabhāva-nirdeśa (Treatise on the Three                                     Natures), Vasubandhu

The old man next door did what he did without fanfare. He maintained a quiet commitment to planting these seeds for their own sake, not for 'rewards' such as fame or money. He lived by fine, subtly miraculous, principles. He was humble, and showed kindness to everyone. He cut peats for neighbours, he fished for them, he made all his acquaintances' lives that bit better. And he always had time for a restless nuisance of a boy. His life was his teaching, and I am still seeing its nuances.

The ideas expressed in the writing on the back of the painting planted another seed in my mind - an interest in Yogacara, a form of Buddhism that explains how thoughts, words and actions are seeds that migrate from one life to the next.

What he did with that painting is what he did with my mind. The self is the other, and there is no other.

It is noteworthy that he attributes the quotation, much as I disclose here that I heard this story from my friend and neighbour John MacLeod, who asked me to share it. May its own humble seeds grow into something worthwhile.