"Christopher Priest - The Discharge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Priest Christopher)

It was Acizzone's work which inspired me.

Details continued to clarify themselves. A coherent exactness emerged from the gloom of my forgotten
past. Rascar Acizzone developed a painting technique he called tactilism. A tactilist work used a kind of
pigment that had been developed some years before, not by artists but by researchers into ultrasound
microcircuitry. A range of dazzling colors became available to artists when certain patents expired and for
a brief period there had been a vogue for paintings that used the garish but exciting ultrasound primaries.

Most of these early works were little more than pure sensationalism: colors were blended synaesthetically
with ultrasonics to shock, alarm or provoke the viewer. Acizzone's work began as the others lost interest,
consigning themselves to the minor artistic school that soon became known as the Pre-Tactilists.
Acizzone used the pigments to more disturbing effect than anyone before him. His glowing
abstractsтАФlarge canvases or boards painted in one or two primary colors, with few shapes or images to
be seenтАФappeared at a casual first look, or from a distance, or when seen as reproductions in books, to
be little more than arrangements of colors. Closer up or, better still, if you made physical contact with the
ultrasonic pigments used in the originals, it became apparent that the concealed images were of most
profoundly and shockingly erotic nature. Detailed and astonishingly explicit scenes were mysteriously
evoked in the mind of the viewer, inducing an intense charge of sexual excitement. I discovered a set of
long-forgotten Acizzone abstracts in the vaults of the museum in Jethra and by the laying on of the palms
of my hands I entered the world of vicarious carnal passion. The women depicted by Acizzone were the
most beautiful and sensual I had ever seen, or known, or imagined. Each painting created its own vision
in the mind of the viewer. The images were always exact and repeatable, but they were unique, being
partially created as an individual response to the sensual longing of the observer.

Not much critical literature about Acizzone remained, but what little I could find seemed to suggest that
everyone experienced each painting differently.

I discovered that Acizzone's career had ended in failure and ignominy: soon after his work was noticed
he was rejected by the art establishment figures, the public notables, the moral guardians, of his time. He
was hounded and execrated, forced to end his days in exile on the closed island of Cheoner. With most
of his originals hidden, and a few more dispersed away from Muriseay to the archives of mainland
galleries, Acizzone never worked again and sank into obscurity.

As a teenage aesthete I cared nothing about his scandalous reputation. All I understood was that the few
paintings of his that were hidden away in the cellars of the Jethran gallery evoked such lustful images in
my mind that I was left weak with unfocused desire and dizzy with amorous longings.

That was the whole bright clarity of my unlocated memory. Muriseay, Acizzone, tactilist masterpieces,
concealed paintings of secret sex.

Who was I who had learned of this? The boy was gone, grown into a soldier. Where was I when it
happened? There must have been a wider life I once lived, but none of those memories had survived.

Once I had been an aesthete; now I was a foot-soldier. What kind of life was that?

Now we were moored in Muriseay Town, just outside the harbor wall. We fretted and strained, wanting
to escape from our sweltering holds. Then:

Shore leave.