Yield To Total Elation: The Visionary Architecture of Achilles Rizzoli
A: St Anthony (holding Christ Child), B: Cat (placid), C: Tower (phallic). A+B=C
I’m a Cat (1976), Achilles Rizzoli
Originally published in The Iowa Review
I do not know why this equation, which can be loosely parsed as “St Anthony + Cat = Architecture,” makes sense. But I know that those slim horizontal lines, the sign understood as solution, offer up a point of entry. This is the total elation of the equals sign = the experience of witnessing how a cat, by heavenly midwifery, might attain equivalence with a work of architecture. The suspicion that such sense might not amount to sanity can be temporarily bracketed – at least until the terms of the equation have been met. For now, it is enough to work backward from that elation of equivalence, for the purpose of analyzing the practical mechanics. Once captured, the iconographic algebra might be applied in any number of formulae – that initial elation, translated, seeped, re-supplied to a life.
The equation appears in the manuscript “I’m a Cat,” inscribed by Achilles Rizzoli (1896- 1981), an architect’s draughtsman living in San Francisco. Marking the demise of his cat, Senior Blondie, in 1976, the manuscript might be described as an elegy, a hagiography, a tract of poetry, but perhaps the most accurate classification is architectural blueprint: inscribed in graphite on vellum, it documents the design of a floor plan and elevation for Senior Blondie’s “inheritance.” For the word “inheritance,” we may substitute “monument” or “metamorphosis” or “apotheosis” – that is to say, the transmutation of the small feline body to architectural form, by grace of the saints; specifically, St Anthony of Padua, patron saint of the lost, with the assistance of a municipal sponsor, St Francis, and other saints of Rizzoli’s own creation – including John F. Kennedy and Emma, Rizzoli’s mother.
And so, squeezed into spaghetti-space between two parallel lines, Senior Blondie – now circulating in catlike, saintlike volutes – stands “divine converted magic like.” He is no longer the scrub of pale fur, waiting to be buried in the back yard. By benefaction of Achilles Rizzoli – “Master Architect,” “High Prince” of a kingdom of heavenly homes – the deceased house cat attains equivalence with its ideal form. What is accessed is the other side of something mortal.
The next step would be to identify the terms of that mortality, for the purpose of calculating the unknown quantity. Between the years of 1935-1972, Rizzoli worked for a small San Francisco architecture firm, drafting renderings for residential and commercial projects: an office building on Columbus, a laundry in Dogpatch. By day he worked for minimum wage to expand his employer’s mediocre designs into applicable blueprints. By night he translated his own architectural visions into meticulous ink-and-wash drawings: cathedrals and palaces, temples and towers, noble spaces raised on the backs of Beaux-Arts caryatids and supported by corseted Gothic buttressing. Neoclassical façades are broken by baroque bas-relief, phallic steeples scrape the sky – follow the signs to the bridal bar, the planetarium, the information bureau.
This was a city, a polis of perfect virtue, the Y.T.T.E. (Yield To Total Elation) – in its drafted form, only a proposal. And yet, the small figure who often appeared on the threshold of each building – male, upright, paper-white – seemed to suggest that the two worlds had already started to merge. Contained within the frame of the door, the figure is made visible by lack of detail; it exists solely as a measure of scale. When it is absent, we wonder.
*
Such a city could not come into being without proper documentation. In the late 1920s, Rizzoli had sought to make his name as a writer with a series of poems and short stories about visionary architects, all of which were summarily declined by publishers; the 280 rejection letters were carefully filed and stored in a closet. In 1933 he self-published a novella under the pseudonym Peter Metermaid, an architectural romance entitled The Colonnade: Versified Fiction Romancing Total Love in Vivid Terms of Highly Entertaining Monumental Mediums. The hero of the tale, an architect by the name of Vincent Reamer, attempts to woo his beloved Leadda Maullettail by building a magnificent colonnade; Leadda, recognizing that Vincent is “afraid of maids but not o’collonades”, gently rebuffs his amorous advances and encourages him to channel his energies towards “the glorious, all-amazing Y.T.T.E.”.
The epiphany of The Colonnade foretold the end of Rizzoli’s literary pursuits; three thousand unsold and unmarketed copies were stored, still wrapped in their original cellophane, alongside the rejection letters. Vincent Reamer was resurrected from the tightly packed pages to become the appointed “Father” of the Y.T.T.E. His face appears as the official seal upon many of Rizzoli’s drawings of buildings, authorizing the rise of a city “far, far above the power of mankind to rear aground”. The words that had preoccupied Rizzoli for years found their way into the drawings: scrolls of text are squeezed and hunched into blank corners, serifed acronyms contract and breed, incantatory poems full of playful neologisms spread across the sky. Promotional spiel was developed, applying a lexicon drawn from the classifieds and lacquered with Biblical diction, and strange names were signed into stone – Maidenburg, Angelhart, Grandicosti – Vincent Reamer’s punning and anagrammatic underlings.
I first encountered Rizzoli’s work in a gallery of outsider art; the inevitable resting place of such a complex visual mythology. The maps and plans of the Y.T.T.E., along with the intermediary “Piafore” drawings and Rizzoli’s final portfolio, “Amte’s Celestial Extravaganza” (A.C.E.), were discovered in a garage in 1991 by the gallerist Bonnie Grossman. Stained by damp and nested by mice, the drawings were hailed by specialists as “the find of the century”. Here lay the work of visionary, a tortured genius – the drawings were invitations to imagine, to imagine ourselves as imaginative, to wish for some secret to be revealed by Rizzoli’s oracular architecture. Here, living between regulation and play, we might know that life can be imagined otherwise. That life is more than, and brillianter, than we think. There are doors, keys to doors. If A=Almighty, B=the Bible, C=Christ and D=Decorative Architecture, then the equation for the origins of human creativity is “A=B/C=D=What?”
Irwin Peter Sicotte, Jr. Symbolically Delineated / The Sayanpeau, 1936, ink on paper, Achilles Rizzoli
Outsider artists – alternatively referred to as “self-taught”, “visionary” or “intuitive” – are artists lauded by the academy for existing outside the academy. They are individuals who make art “against the odds”, proof of the resilience of the human spirit against mental illness or social disenfranchisement. Naturally there have been speculations that Rizzoli was schizophrenic, but no there is no proof. And there is certainly no suggestion that he considered himself an artist. A writer, perhaps. An aspiring architect, often. But his official title, the contract somewhere signed and lost, was “earthly architectural assistant and transcriber”. His employer: God. The drawings were not capriccios, they were transcriptions. They were not abstractions but “amplifications”; the expansion of heavenly communication into tectonic perfection. What we might describe as “art”, outsider or otherwise, was not made for this world.
*
When I lived in Oxford, I attended chapel evensong three times a week. Queen’s was my chapel of choice, the superb ugliness of the choir only enhancing the beauty of their singing. Merton, with its incense and lengthy sermons, was a little too High Church for me. New College and Magdalen had inward-facing box pews, where you could sit gently spying on the worshippers across the aisle. For a time I even thought myself religious. It never occurred to me that the shiver of the holy spirit might in fact be the thrill of institutional ritual; the way polyphony out-sounded the rustle of tourist rain-ponchos. Language, I had been taught, “gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvelously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours” (George Steiner). If the psalms were a heightened form of literary criticism, then prayer was the culmination of literary expression. Down on an embroidered kneeler, in memoriam Vera or Ron, truth was twisted to a greater pitch: the brain spoke its silent words, and God responded that all was good.
If I attended evensong in naïve pursuit of meaning, then it was not a god or demiurge creator I was seeking. Rather, proof of a human claim on the world, of the hold of high culture, of signs of the significance of self-made systems. It took me some time to realize that it was not God I was worshipping, but art. Prayer by prayer, my eyelids would peel upwards to see the manifestation of God on earth: oil-paint pietas, foliate rood screens, hair bristled on the nape of a neck, and tufting from the tops of stiff collared shirts. I would close my eyes and think of England.
In America my faith lay dormant, aesthetically suppressed by the prospect of Evangelical megachurches and waxed-wood Episcopalianism. But today, for purely logistical reasons, I find myself attending Sunday Mass at the Immaculate Conception Church in New Orleans. Originally constructed by the Jesuits in 1857, the church was re-built in 1929, when the stone floor split down the middle due to the 18-story high-rise being built alongside. The church has the aesthetic syncretism of excited minds from a cold climate; Neo-Venetian Gothic Revival, combining narrow lancet windows with Moorish horseshoe arches and a Byzantine dome. I am not a Catholic, but today I’ll take the faith at its word; bypassing the assertion of “universalism” and opting instead for “all-embracing” or “eclectic” or “indiscriminate” – the liberal’s hazy answer to fundamentalism.
Sitting next to me, in the third from the back row on the right hand side of the nave, is Jean-Luc: French, middle-aged, a wandering aesthete now training to be a priest. He is slight, with a bulbous nose and small round glasses, his chinos bear the marks of bicycle clips and his bow tie matches his silvery waistcoat. All I know about Jean-Luc is his taste in poetry and philosophy, knowledge gleaned from reading the marginalia in books stored at the home of my ex-boyfriend, on loan during the time that Jean-Luc decided to leave New Orleans forever after he broke up with his partner, a beautiful businesswoman with flaming red hair, and went to live in a monastery consisting of two other monks, in Vermont. Now, he is back, and I am to stay in his house while he attends a retreat for trainee priests.
The Y.T.T.E. Plot Plan, 1938, ink on paper, Achilles Rizzoli
My current lodgings are infested by mice. When I visit New Orleans I usually stay in Mid-City, accommodated by a poet-for-hire, prone to wearing pink suits and driving a rickety Ford convertible – currently parked up on a grassy curb, two smashed windows replaced by flapping trash bags. These days, the poet has given up propositioning me; instead, my air-mattress on the floor is visited nightly by small beating bodies and scaly tails. Or rather, this is the story I told my ex-boyfriend to wheedle my way back to his home in Uptown. Instead, he introduced me by text to Jean-Luc, who suggested that we meet for Sunday Mass at the Immaculate Conception, Baronne St, 9:30am, third from the back row on the right hand side of the nave, pax et bonum.
The vaporous sun had translated to rain by the time I caught the streetcar, and Saturday night was still filtering out of Bourbon Street when I reached my stop, jumping the gutter, onto Baronne, and into the chill of the antechapel. There, the man fitting Jean-Luc’s description, walks with his hands clasped behind his back, inspecting the embossed plasterwork of the columns. I approach him, reaching, until he makes the connection and our hands meet, “welcome”. And – “I hear you are staying in a house ingested by rice?” – which I assume is a French and indirect way of saying “infested by mice”. Yes, I explain – business has been tough for the poet-for-hire – they say there are 30 of his kind plying their trade in the French Quarter. His new rental is at the lowest point of the Mid-City flood-plane, the mice will wash away when water rises.
We install ourselves in the aforementioned pew, and speak of the gold-plated altar and the white marble Blessed Virgin, rescued by the Jesuits during the French Revolution. We talk of the architectural tours led by the priests on Saturday afternoons, and the huge pipe organ which, when it was first played at the 1884 World Cotton Centennial, caused the expo-tent to collapse. The church and its cruciform structure set the terms of our conversation: a deflection of the personal reinforced with elements of architecture. When there is nothing left to say, we pray, until the service starts up at a slow grind. The opening hymn is “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken”, and we sing by soundlessly staring at the lines.
The plot plan of the Y.T.T.E. bears an unspoken resemblance to the floor plan of a cathedral. The central body of the plan is blocked into pew-like structures and veined with esplanades like aisles through a nave; arm-like transepts jut out either side, and at the head of the plan is an apse-like arch, contained within a cortex of bulging chevets. The plot plan was designed to bring a perfect city into being, but it was also a plan of a prototype of a plan; that is, a plan for an imaginary world’s fair.
In 1915, the year that Rizzoli moved to San Francisco, the city was dominated by the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world’s fair occupying a 635-acre site on the north shore. Staged ostensibly to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, the exposition served to affirm the city’s recovery after the 1906 earthquake. A Tower of Jewels, light caught and refracted by 100,000 tinted gems. A domed and colonnaded Palace of Fine Arts, designed to devolve into romantic ruins. Neoclassical pavilions stood for the civic pillars of manufacture, agriculture, education, transportation – faux-marble confections designed to be pulled down at the end of the run. And, beyond the borders of the exposition, was the Joy Zone: a sub-city of satyric release, driving revenue through an assortment of rides, freak shows and sexually charged spectacles.
The event category “world’s fair” occupies a strange hinterland in space and time. It seeks to express the breadth and grandeur of the world, while shrinking that world to a self-sufficient microcosm. It is a physical, navigable structure which nonetheless rests on what it refers to; it is only idea. An idea which becomes condensed and conflated with the city that contains it, which in turn becomes the center of the world. The Panama-Pacific Exposition was a model for an illustrious future, projecting an optimism which would later be echoed and surpassed by Rizzoli’s plans for the Y.T.T.E. The pavilions on the north shore would be embellished and buffed into spiritual significance; the site relocated to an atemporal island between heaven and earth. Exclusive Y.T.T.E. features emerge from perjured earthly structures: The Shrine of Make Believe (“commonly the motion picture show”), The Hall of Fame (“the image of God to adorn its major niche”), and The Shaft of Ascension (“in which euthanasia is available to those desiring and meriting a pleasant, painless voyage from this land”).
It is perhaps to be expected that the 19-year-old engineering student, lately arrived in the city with his mother and siblings, should be enthralled by the gilded prophecy of progress and perfection. The family had been living in western Marin County, where Rizzoli’s father, Innocente, worked as a farmhand on a dairy ranch. He had immigrated from his home on the Swiss-Italian border in 1885, and shortly afterwards met Emma, a fellow immigrant from Southern Switzerland. Together they raised five children – the fourth, being Achilles Gildo Rizzoli – but Innocente’s meagre earnings were not enough to support the family. In 1912 Rizzoli moved to Oakland to study at the Polytechnic College of Engineering, and was soon obliged to share his lodgings with his sister Olympia, who had fallen pregnant out of wedlock. Disgraced and impoverished, the family unit started to split. Emma and the remaining children left for San Francisco, while Innocente stayed behind at the dairy ranch. In the spring of 1915, his employer reported the theft of a gun, and the disappearance of one of his employees.
Rizzoli, uprooted and unfathered, poured his faith into the civic splendor of the Panama Pacific Exposition. Architecture, surely, was the highest expression of human ingenuity; man’s fulfilled form, naturally, that of master architect. Though constrained by his social and economic standing, Rizzoli nonetheless took up a traineeship as a draughtsman. In 1916 he subscribed to membership of The San Francisco Architectural Club, an initiative for those without the means to attend architecture school. Here he learnt the principles of Beaux-Arts draftsmanship: the structural and aesthetic merits of combining styles from different eras, the importance of symmetry, proportion and balance as one cobbled together elements from Greek temples, medieval citadels, Victorian train stations.
The task was to synthesize the best of what had been, as though – by twisting, calibrating, recombining – one might tap into an eternal order. There were laws to be drawn from, but also those to be revealed; the upshot was an interminable process of sketching, scaling, shadowing, color rendering – all for drawings which bore little relation to the world beyond the studio. Rizzoli resigned his membership in 1923. He took with him an armful of renderings; competent impossibilities, exquisite corpses of sections and spolia in search of something more than the sum of their parts.
When the rest of his siblings had either married or fled, Rizzoli and Emma moved into a house in Bernal Heights, 1668 Alabama Street; here, he would live for the rest of his life, sleeping in a cot by the side of his mother’s bed. He would do a series of side jobs, working on the manuscript of The Colonnade until, in 1935, securing a position at Otto Deichmann’s architecture firm, where he would stay for almost four decades. That year, he handed his mother a birthday card. “The Kathredal: Mother Symbolically Represented”. It was his mother in the form of a Gothic Cathedral. Robust ogivals and flying buttresses express composure and pulchritude, elaborate tracery denotes diligence and charm. It was the first “Major Unit of the Y.T.T.E.”. The foundation stone, the source from which life springs. Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.
We stare at the hymn, willing the conversion of sight to sound. Now and again, Jean-Luc chokes out a refrain, I respond with sudden prefixes and mezzo frequencies. Jean-Luc is unreadable. I cannot work out his faith, his coordinates, where he stands at this stage, on this stage, in relation to God. He twists his lip, furrows his brow as he chants the Nicene Creed, like someone trying to solve a crossword puzzle in a waiting room. God is his prospective employer, and Jean-Luc is scoping him out, scanning the employee reviews.
“I exist in an unbelievably hermetically sealed spherical inalienable maze of light and sound seeing imagery expand in every direction”, wrote Rizzoli. For the light which squeezed from the corners of the eyes and fell to the page did not inscribe anything as simple as an amateur’s city plan. In each drawing, a transmutation is taking place.
The Y.T.T.E. Plot Plan (key), 1938, ink on paper, Achilles Rizzoli
As we sing, the next act assembles. Perhaps I am the only one to see the preacher creep up the pulpit steps, watch her mutter a phrase and adjust the sleeve of her cassock. No noise now – there she stands, a truncated Venus, head and shoulders crested by a giant mahogany scallop shell. She is short and pouchy, with cropped grey hair and there she is in against the shell, alerting us to Isaiah 51:6, p183 of the pew bibles. The polished shell has the shadow-effect of trompe l’oeil, and sight stops sound until– lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look to the earth beneath. For the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment, and those who live on it will die like gnats – breaks through, sound catching on the word gnats but the reading must have ceased because the heads have now turned to where the gnats yield to song, from the mouth of a woman on the other side of the chancel, song from a long neck planted in a corporate jacket. We are healed of the diagnosis of Isaiah, we are receiving salvation from our fate dictated, the words pulled and mauled into operatic vowels, souped through her headset and out through the speakers.
The Y.T.T.E. was not was not plucked from the air. It was built from bodies: the transmutation of bodies, beings who attained their ideal form as architectural expression. Thus was born a city, a community: “The Kathredal”, as its centerpiece – for architecture was the mother of the arts – and six-year-old Shirley, a neighbor, to serve as first lady and virginal hostess. Shirley’s Temple was the work of several month’s labor, a drawing almost as tall as the “young miss” herself, frilled with tiers and crocketed spires, each peaked with a finial of a tiny dancing figure. The postman is a Classical edifice – longitudinal and pilastered – Rizzoli’s colleague Gerry a steadfast water tower, and Mr Deichmann’s mother – progenitor of his earthly employer – a modernist skyscraper.
Architecture’s capacity to articulate character was a key principle of Beaux-Arts theory; fortitude is a well-proportioned pediment, a garlanded cornice is playfulness and grace. And yet, Rizzoli’s portraits incorporated their own nuanced code of formal embodiment. His method is anti-anthropomorphic: while a quoined window might resemble a heavy-lidded eye, or a door a gaping mouth, Rizzoli had no intention of reducing architectural form to blunt human features. Those he chose to portray amounted to far more than their skin-scrag bodies; Rizzoli sought “the conversion of the soul into objects of monumental character”, drawing from all that was lasting and good, so as to capture the essence of a person’s virtue. The portraits are proxies, “symbolical sketches”. But they are also the thing in itself, expressing itself from itself; an eternal blueprint, architecture as incarnation and apotheosis.
“Nothing Like It Ever Before Attempted”, a promotional banner blazes over the Y.T.T.E. Or maybe it – it – has been attempted, in every story, in every art form, right down to technique of pressing fortified wheat into wafers to be placed over open palms. Rizzoli, however, administered salvation in a more businesslike fashion. Architecture was the language by which human flesh might be sublimated. Thus portrayed, the subject was granted a plot of celestial real estate; they became the building they would exist as and inhabit in heaven. Destiny secured, no questions asked. It was a negotiation with St Peter, an oiling of the locks. The death you deserved, preordained, located, confirmed. The death that had always been there, growing within you like a tiny keyhole.
It is here, on the threshold, that tenses start to shiver and fail. Senior Blondie is dead. He once was cat, now he is architecture. By grace of the saints he is, and inhabits, his heavenly home – a multistory tower, peaked by an onion dome. He is, and attains, his inheritance, cementing his limp body to the legacy of eternal posterity. In death he becomes the purest expression of what he always was: a small and perfect soul is extracted through the cat-nostrils and amplified to heavenly proportions. A question bubbles like a blister: would Blondie have attained his heavenly home without Rizzoli’s generous intercession? Most likely, but it is not worth risking the wager. To be portrayed by Rizzoli was akin to a performance of last-rights, a lawyer’s attendance at the signing of a will, the laying of wet clay upon the still-warm face of the recently deceased. He is – as the signatures on his many manuscripts attest – Jelly Maker, Zitherist, Embalmer.
I am called back to the Immaculate Conception as Jean-Luc resumes his sputter-song. The corporate-suited woman is still standing on the platform with her arm outstretched, as though pulling in nets as she motions for us to sing – Jean-Luc jiggles the leather-bound missal and points at the line with a shrug. Mouthing the words, I inspect the rest of the congregation. The silky children in the parallel pew are plaiting each other’s hair; their mother is terrifyingly beautiful and unmotherly, a nose tweaked at the tip as though attached to the wires that loop from the ceiling. I stand and sit in sync with the service – bobbing to the sound of psalms and sermon and the offertory hymn, the white noise of rustling purses eliding with the organ. Eyes follow the smell of sweated metal as the collection plate passes, and veined hands feel into pebbled leather bags.
I wonder if it is the fear of idolatry that had warned me off religion, the fear of a bad investment – of being beholden to perishable goods. And yet, as I bend in acknowledgment of the liturgy of the Eucharist, I know that there is something that rises in those rote phrases and intoned responses – a barely audible whistle, a keening assault on sense which breaks through orthodoxy and the frontiers of language. I believe we are at our most human when courting the transcendent. Rituals and devotional objects are a means to an end, tools to contain and shape praise – but they are also a deification of the imagination, whereby the narrative trappings of sacrament become worthy of worship in themselves. There is no blasphemy in mistaking our creations for God. “If God did not exist, we would have to invent him”, but we need God less than we need religion; the most enduring form of popular culture, the creation of rich and capacious myths by which everyday life is imbued with the mystery of the cosmos. That imaginative super-structure is what we live for – and for which we might die. It is what will save us from world-weariness.
“Now there’s no more any longer any reason for feeling lonely”, Rizzoli inscribes to the trill of a treble clef at the top of the 1938 Y.T.T.E. plot plan. Three years after the first symbolic sketch, the Master Architect had gathered a substantial community of two dimensional structures, on show once a year at the annual Achilles Tectonic Exhibit (A.T.E.), 1668 Alabama Street, first Sunday of August, 1-5pm. The hand-drawn posters pasted around the neighborhood pointed the way to a new world order, the center of human progress, contained in the single-story house half way up the hill. It was dark inside, a torch was required to reveal the drawings hanging on the parlor walls. Admission was 10 cents a head, but those who attended did not go unrecognized – a first-time visitor who showed a polite interest would, more often than not, find themselves immortalized under the torchlight the following year. A blocky palazzo, Margaret E. Griffin, “the leading visitor to the A.T.E. during its 3rd anniversary day”. The Palais Pallou, Brother Lou and Sister Palmira, “being the furthest traveled visitors, visiting from Monterey, California”. And of course, Shirley, Virginia, Janet and the rest, the children who would dare to knock on the door, not to know they would be turned to stone, to paper, to ether.
If the supply of bodies diminished between exhibitions, there was always an odd job to fill the time. Rizzoli revised the Y.T.T.E. throughout his life, attending to practical matters (adding service entrances and enlarging livestock pastures) and adjusting in accordance with modern trends (installing a Young Peoples’ Center, a Pen of Bestiality, an Amusenblock and a Pit of Debauchery). Whereas the Panama-Pacific Exposition had pushed the Joy Zone beyond the periphery, the Y.T.T.E. displayed no such compunction. Less salubrious attractions were boldly incorporated into the primary site; this was a world where evil could play itself out and lapse into the good, where “love’s delightful labors” would distill matter to its purest form.
One element remains consistent throughout each revision. “The Dark Horse of the Festival Year”, a secretive shrine-like structure to the north of the site, flanked by the navy, the army, the zoo and the aviary. The form of the Dark Horse is difficult to imagine – a numbered circle marks its place on the map, the caption reads, “in which achieving the impossible is expected to be made a reality”. Reached via a flight of steps, the structure is all emptiness – but its meaning is manifest. A waiting space for the figure whose absence overshadowed the Festival year of 1915: Rizzoli’s father, Innocente. The defining and enlivening mystery, that which enshrouds, inseminates, creates.
In the summer of 1936, the remains of a body, a suicide, were found in a forest in Marin Country; a name was attributed, the family notified. The mystery of the Horse rang hollow, but still, it stood. That same year, Rizzoli’s mother was hospitalized, suffering from gangrene; the leg was amputated and she returned to the house to be nursed by her son. He moved the cot closer, kept all her possessions, the cupboard of dresses, the “honey bucket” under her bed – long after she had died. Altars were raised on Mother’s Day, a vase of begonias, an airtight jar of syruped peaches. At the funeral, a neighbor observed as Rizzoli stood beside his mother’s body, trying to open her eyes.
Time has a habit of folding into itself when you’re not watching. On the first Sunday of August, 1938, a new Kathredal appeared on the parlor wall. “Mother Symbolically Recaptured: Birthday Greetings.” It was magnificent – an elevation due west, elongating the initial portrait into a landscape format of violet-inked gables and sweeping staircases, a structure which undulated like an odalisque and bristled with tiny spear-wielding statues. The following year, another elevation marked the occasion of his mother’s birthday, and so on with increasingly elaborate renovations, generating a multi-dimensional mother to replace the shape slowly fading from memory. In 1940, Rizzoli discontinued the A.T.E.; closed the small door on the house like a face. It may have been around this time that the saints first approached him with a commission.
He had been headhunted by heaven. As God’s appointed architect, he held the honor – the obligation – of transcribing whatever divine visions came his way. Best to think of them as professional briefings. An official transcription could take the form of poetry, prose, architectural designs, auxiliary graphics – any method “acceptable to spiritual authorities”. It was up to Rizzoli to define that acceptability, submitting his designs for group feedback night after night. He titled the project “Amte’s Celestial Extravaganza”, Amte being the female consort of Christ and an acronym of Architecture Made To Entertain – though any entertainment was tailored to a gravely celestial sense of humor. One had to be careful to meet the demands of the audience. Especially as this was – as JFK revealed in an offhand comment – the Third Testament of the Bible.
I do not take communion. I sit in an empty pew and wait as the bread and wine is manifested by the line of passing faces, still chewing and sucking, and quickly forgetting as sacrament is pushed along by weekend chores and shopping lists, lamb for lunch and Sunday parking at Rousses. Jean-Luc sidesteps back to his seat, straightens his waistcoat, and kneels. There is the final blessing and the dismissal and the organ voluntary, piping out the sounds of a swiftly moving digestive system.
Shirley’s Temple - Shirley Jean Bersie Symbolically Sketched, 1939, ink on paper, Achilles Rizzoli
Parishioners filter out of the pews and form small groups which clog the aisles; unwilling to muscle our way through, Jean-Luc and I flatten against a column and wait for the weekly conversations to disintegrate. Sight drapes over the leaden lines of the stained glass windows; Peter Claver preaching to slaves in Colombia, blessed Charles Spinola martyred in Japan. John de Brito about to be beheaded by turbaned infidels, Bobola skinned and needled by the Cossacks. These are intercessory lessons cast in light, designed to instruct via image and anecdote, but also to enthrall – when light is filtered, to see is to believe. When, in the fifteenth century, English pilgrims saw wooden wounds bleed from a crucified wooden body – when a carved Christ was seen “to rolle the eies, to wag the chaps, to bende the browes” – they weren’t to know that the Church was a sponsor of some of the earliest automata. What was known was the absolute power of an institution to which matter itself was subject.
The notion of transcendence has always been tool for power; from transcendence falls the spawning of a hierarchy, like the lowering of a ladder from heaven. And on the top rung stand those authorized to intercede, to send the whispers back down to the ground. It is very important to keep our distance, to agree to the divide between the transcendent and the base. We submit to the myth of “more than this” because it allows for the structures by which we generate meaning; the possibility of that better body, that other city, that other lover who will reach and heave us into the world to come. For our own ongoingness, the pointing must be separated from the ineffable point – even when we brush so close that bread might bleed.
A few streets away, in the clapboard shotgun of Bountiful Blessings Full Gospel, the mic is switched down and the drum kits stored. In the Catholic chapel on Rampart Street, someone is cleaning the floor and there are bodies slumped in the pews, praying, snoring, in shelter – a phone blasts staticky lyrics, is answered, returns to rest. On the highway to the airport, a veteran waves a placard “free test - will you go to heaven”, and a yoga class is starting in the Trinity Episcopal crypt. I know that at home it is evening, that the church doors are locked to protect the silver. The village was scandalized when valuable paving stones were pulled up in the night, stolen to be sold as dozen garden patios – the graveyard path was a seam of dark earth, and we hopped and hobbled over it like gleeful frogs.
Jean-Luc and I are in need of coffee, but agree that Nescafe in the community room won’t do. Our options are PJ’s Coffee opposite Voodoo-Mart, and the Roosevelt Hotel, and so we cross the road to the Roosevelt, walking the glittering marble floors through the corridor of palms. The café queue is slow with churchgoers, and we take our time contemplating the Viennoiserie and iced petits fours – I am on a writer’s salary, Jean-Luc a trainee priest’s, and there is some hesitation as to who will pay – Jean-Luc capitulates, “I invite you”, and I obligingly choose a small filter coffee. Two waters arrive in plus-size plastic cups, straws and lids, and while Jean-Luc waits to pay I find us a table – realizing, as I sit down, that I have walked off with the church missal. I place it guiltily next to the menu.
There is a dexterousness to religious thought which has always appealed to me – the rational scaffolding which surrounds and supports the empty space of faith, necessitating a type of pedantic acrobatics. A whole theology might rest on the question of whether or not Adam and Eve had belly buttons, or whether they were in fact transparent, glazed containers of guts and nerve fibres and unmediated truth; the argumentation of the Scholastics pressures language to a form of poetry, a cross-stitching of syllogisms bringing God into being. These are matters of belief – that which is made possible by establishing strict limits and definitions, walls which allow us to defend our convictions. Faith – that empty inside – is something different, a type of active surrender and synthesis. It is an acceptance of what is, and a commitment to actively observe and respond; it does not despise doctrine, it simply sees no need for it. To have faith means to cast aside the ladder, to pass over in silence.
And this is why I cannot be among the faithful. I could believe – I could split and shape and resynthesize and repeat. But I will not step down from the scaffolding. Rizzoli and I – we suffer the same fate. Bored of the dualistic definitions – good and evil, alive and dead, earth and sky, man and God – we will play at marrying and procreation to bide the time. The results fill a few pages. In Rizzoli’s case, the traineeship of the Y.T.T.E., and the 2600 divinely ordained pages of the A.C.E., prepared as 8.5 x 11 inch segments to be cut and bound and distributed for public readership. He saw no fault in comingling the base and transcendent; in the manuscript “I’m a Cat”, part of the transmutation process is the chronicling of Blondie’s kittenhood and maturation, his fondness for cavorting with Blackie, Milky, Rainbow and Sunnyboy, his special liking for Honey who is “in heat”. Such details are the base materials required for the transmutation, just as mud may be shaped into bricks and bricks into buildings which raise man aloft. And when we reach the next stage of the game, we are given an impossible assignment to keep us clinging to the scaffolding. Rizzoli, required to transcribe the divine. I, the total elation of =
I have chosen a table in a corner, facing two mirrored walls which meet at a right angle. My features are eliminated – sliced through by the join – but there are the coiffed children from the service, picking delicately at mille-feuille and profiteroles, and their mother is in skintone slacks, untying a knot in a necklace. A short and shiny woman makes her way across the mirror, she is wearing platform wedges with ribbons up to the knee, she tips – slightly – as though stretching to see a reflection in the floor – and then falls, crashes to the marble which meets her half-way. The incident is unheard amid the café sounds of the high ceiling, and the woman quickly wriggles from the floor, kneels, her mouth open in a silent roar of defensive laughter for anyone who might see. I am struck by a mortal terror that Jean-Luc has witnessed the fall. I am embarrassed for Jean-Luc’s embarrassment, the sudden bathos of the situation, the strain it will place on the maintenance of social mores – but he walks towards our table, face actively oblivious to any inconsistency, and I remember that we are two Europeans staying for a time in the South.
How to convert contradiction into heavenly singularity? It takes rigorous training, only a Master Architect might hope to achieve such a feat. Rizzoli had the initial talent, the ability to transgress conventional distinctions and generate sinuous hybrids: the bestial and ethereal, Biblical and commercial, anatomical and architectural. Extreme asceticism was necessary; Rizzoli prided himself on his thriftiness and celibacy, even designing a Y.T.T.E. monument, the Sungkenart, “commemorating the lost art of remaining virgin lifelong”. His innocence would be tested, as in the case of his first sighting of the naked female form, that of a three-year-old girl playing in the neighbors’ garden. Towers rose up in response – “The Picture We See Should We See The Veeaye” – the “Primalglimpse at 40” – “The VASP” – towers to fill and populate that vast gap in the psyche – ‘interpreting the reaction experienced during that incomparable moment’ – “The Bluesea House” – “The Ornament”– “A Bit of Architecture”–
These structures were excellent – masterly sublimations. And what’s more, they kept the Architect’s carnal instincts at bay. But the hand-drawn drafts were not enough. The saints soon dismissed these little phallic fantasies – they demanded more and better – to spin image and text into ever sweeter delights, ever more delicate, tighter, perfect transcriptions. “Oh Dio Mio!” Rizzoli exclaims across the page – “all this, expected of one man to do, is simply outrageous.” But the saints were uncompromising in their demand for accuracy and punctuality. His visions were a gift; the least he could do was respond in kind. And yet he grew sloppier, made amateur mistakes, had to be threatened with being shredded to pieces. Exhausted by the punishing quest for perfection, Rizzoli saw a small darkness at the edge of the light. The only way out of this bind was to escape the great slough of the body. Gradually, over the course of many blurred mornings, many nights at his desk, Rizzoli started to long for death.
I confess my theft of the prayer book, and Jean-Luc forgives me with an indulgent sweep of the hand – we can go back later, it’s just across the road, I hope you will help me with this slice of Sachertorte. He folds his linen jacket over the arm of the high-backed chair and sits back, framed in burgundy and gold like a Velasquez pope. Tells me about the doctrinal squabbles within the seminary, the catering at Catholic retreats, his recipe for kumquat marmalade, the origin of his spiritual calling – one morning, after confirmation class, the priests had asked the boys whether any had considered a career in the ministry. After a long silence, scabby elbows inspected and ankles stretched, Jean-Luc and his twin brother raised their hands simultaneously. I do not see the boy twins, two miniature Jean-Lucs in bow ties. I see two of me, matching aesthetes aspiring to a library and a village green. I look at Jean-Luc in his pre-priest purgatory and think, God is on my mind because I am afraid of mice. He leans forward with a knife and splits the Sachertorte.
And between the gluey tendons of each bite, arises an answer to the problem of the cat and the saint and the tower and the equals sign. Not yet a solution, but the matter required to close the gap, to string the sequential into simultaneous sense-making. Sense is connectivity is a condition of split – to “articulate” means both to divide into distinct parts, and to attach by joints. An algebraic equation is the expression of an impossible equivalence; the task is to disprove that impossibility by converting missing terms – a shadow-language of nonexistence – into workable quantities, to drag them back into the here and now. The Arabic root of the word “algebra”, jabara, translates to the “reunion of broken parts”, and the pivot of the word is the idea of return – whether uttered as “restore”, or “reunite”, or “reintegrate” – which is to say, the conversion that occurs, back to the earth, is a return to unity.
Somewhere along the way, we went wrong. We decided that unitary truth was on the side of the shadow-language. That notion of a transcendent universal is the keystone of the Western episteme; it is Pythagoras’ principle of the divinity of number and Plato’s theory of forms; it is the face of the driver who steers the car in sunlit curves, and the shape of the second lives that gather and crystallize online. Whichever philosophy or set of values we subscribe to, the idea of transcendence is the negative space which gives reality its shape. And it is for this reason that Rizzoli’s work cannot be dismissed as a mere curiosity. It is a calculation, a measure of the idea of heaven. A heaven which persists: the turning mechanism of ideal forms, the rack on which our lives are stretched and shaped.
Is it too late to reinvest reality with its essential unity? If ordinary madness is the experience of brokenness and split, then extraordinary madness – what you get locked up for – is the conviction that that everything makes sense. And so, Rizzoli, in the small house half-way up the hill, was better off measuring the proportions of heaven, better off locating total elation in the afterlife. The only issue was time – the saints were sending briefings day and night, requiring him to transcribe from an immutable all-time, and, all the while, daily life kept entering one’s field of vision – light and water came at a price, the mailbox hoarded mildewed bills, someone was being un-neighborly about the overgrown tree ferns. A hole appeared in the roof, vines crept through, a washtub gathered the rain that fell. The cats seemed incapable of cleaning up after themselves – newspaper was a solution, on the floor, easily caught – a house now contained in paper, a paper world, watch your step –
It was not enough to allot heavenly homes to friends and family, cats included. A true Master Architect, First Within The Heart Of God, loves the whole of humanity. And so, there were architectural inheritances to be drafted for people he saw at the supermarket, those he passed on the way to church, those whose faces appeared on the floor in obituaries. In accordance with the practice of the S.F. Architectural Club – long ago disbanded – every draft was to be rated and ranked via a rubric of symbolization, composition, draftsmanship and rendering. The saints huddled, conferred, and returned to announce that his grades were getting worse. He might drag his heels, talk of “tarrying on the surface of the earth”, but he should remember that he owed his existence to God. They were following strict orders: he was to be kept on life support for as long as he could serve the holy purpose.
Might it have crossed Rizzoli’s mind, one early morning after a long night of drafting, emerging to sit on the back porch, looking out into the undergrowth of what had once been his mother’s garden – that the saints, perhaps, weren’t on his side? That there had been some miscommunication, some bureaucratic error – that he was, in fact, being punished for his post-Promethean capacities? Not since the heyday of the Y.T.T.E., which had ceased back in the 1940s, had he considered himself capable of any creative agency. When the saints started making regular house calls, Rizzoli had willingly renounced his position as magus: his dreams of civic possibility had yielded to visions of celestial fixity. He transcribed, he was a copyist. He had divested himself of faith in his terrestrial talents, had directed his energies toward the God-given project, had turned away from the earth and submitted to the mysteries of heaven – but still, might it be, that he knew too much.
In 1977, Rizzoli was incapacitated by a stroke. It was his good luck that he had left the house that day – that he was found on the sidewalk of a city street – had he stayed at home, it could have been months before anyone knocked and entered. Though perhaps such a fate was preferable to what ensued: four years in a nursing home, unable to speak, write or draw. Members of Rizzoli’s extended family were called for – not for years had he received a birthday card, but there they were by his bed, obliging, helping to sign the paperwork. Not to worry, everything had been arranged for. The funeral had been paid in advance, and the sale of the house could cover the nursing home fees.
What the family saw when they arrived to clear the property was not so different from that witnessed by visitors to the A.T.E. over 30 years earlier. It was dark in the parlor. The room was empty except for the framed drawings which covered all four walls, drawings on display since the first Sunday of August, 1940. Time flexed and folded – bent to scratch an itch on its back. For a moment, it was all again; the silhouettes of visitors, the whispered exchanges, someone takes out a torch, sees. And then – the detaching and stacking and loading into the back of the car. The newspaper, peeled from the floor with rubber gloves and scrunched into trash bags. Several hundred sheets of vellum in the back room, disclosing the secrets of heaven. Held up to the light and quickly concealed in cardboard boxes. And there was more – there must have been more, if we are to believe draftsman’s lists and inventories. Several drawings had gone missing in the months since Rizzoli’s stroke. Theft, or saintly intercession, one cannot tell.
Jean-Luc raises the coffee cup to his lips, and drinks. In the mirror I can see the back of his chair, and beyond, the expanse of the café with its gold-trimmed pilasters and mottled-cream walls, light emitted by unseen LEDs and diffused in the shallow scoop of the concave ceiling. Here, heavenly tropes are fitted to standardized hotel décor; it is as though Thomas Browne’s old maxim, that the world is not an inn but a hospital, a place not to live but to die, has been unstitched and refashioned to commercial specifications. Décor designed to invoke the best possible life is based on visions of the afterlife, and visa versa. And so, we find ourselves in purgatory. It is almost lunchtime, and the queue extends into the foyer: kaftans, and jumpsuits, crop tops and rompers, cargo shorts and Saints shirts, each with a carry-on suitcase.
Both Jean-Luc and I us have places to be, and our meeting concludes with practicalities – how to access Jean-Luc’s house while he’s away, the street number, key code, feeding the cat, closing the fridge, dusting down and locking up. It has been good to meet. We do not know each other any better, and our dissociation forges a type of closeness; both Jean-Luc and I have distanced ourselves from an idea of home, heavenly or otherwise. We shake hands outside the hotel; he unlocks his bicycle, puts on his helmet, and turns to wave before he cycles onto Canal Street, past Voodoo-Mart, and Denim Den, and Saks 5th Avenue, towards the river.
I cross the road to return the prayer book. The call-and-response of another service can be heard through the door, so I stand on the church steps, waiting for a tactful moment to enter. Two men pass by wearing St Paddy’s top hats and false beards, liquid spilling from crock-of-gold tumblers. Behind them, a man in bedroom slippers guides a bicycle weighed down by bulging plastic bags. I am standing in the doorway, I am a measure of scale. I am the unit by which the universe is measured, the definition of the limits of my miniature perspective. I am terrified by the idea of transcendence; it is a negation of life, a premature death. Better that we source our meaning from where we stand; that we be a measure of scale, a networked node upon which the world centers and from which it extends, a receptacle of perception, a truth that fulfills itself.
There was an equation. It calculated Total Elation. And now that I have come full circle, I know that the formula is simpler than I thought. To achieve Total Elation, apply an equals sign. That is not to say that Total Elation is the experience of perfect equivalence. The very idea causes the + and the = to turn like torture devices, peeling away at life, positioned not to propel us into heaven but to turn us on its irons. Instead, we might think of the equals sign as a type of incitement or provocation. Total Elation is not the attainment of, but the process of reaching towards that equivalence, an attempt which necessitates a falling from; the shape of the fall, the experience of living, might be understood as an art. Perfect translation ≈ cohesion ≈ equivalence, is the end of art, and for that reason we have not yet read the last word on love, or death, or divinity. Art is a measurement of the gap between us and the “more than”, for what is, is already expressed. To bear witness to that fact is a yielding. To know it as being, is elation.
It was Rizzoli’s greatest failing that he created art; that his work – his afterlife – was to be classified as such. Art is an earthly phenomenon, and Rizzoli was working in terms of transcendence. If his drawings are art, they are the most brutally unequivocal, self-destructively authentic, works of art I have ever seen; to enter into them is to be sent through the thick space of grace, skinned to scaffolding and pinned to stone. There is no doubt that these works arose from experiences of loss and lack – bereavement, sexual inhibition, financial insecurity, the remoteness of God. The drawings are a way to keep out the cold; but what we press under the door or between the cracks of the window, engenders its own shape. There is love in Rizzoli’s work: a glorification of those who had been kindest to him, and the personal qualities he valued. The greatest expression of his love was to confer certainty upon mutable beings, securing them a place in heaven. In this way, his images allow for the same falling from – the same surrender to the unspoken – as the greatest works of art. They share the truth of St John of the Cross, who knew that in the evening of life we will be judged on love alone; or, in the words of the old atheist, what will survive of us is love.
That keening whistle, strung between every word like a wire, slackens. In talking of love, we have fallen to the other side of the equals sign, quite by accident. Behind the great wooden door, I hear the opening chords of a hymn and the shuffle and thump of bodies standing – as good a moment as any to enter. I step within, and close the door behind me.
The Kathredal - Mother Symbolically Represented, 1935, ink on paper, Achilles Rizzoli