The Void

March 11, 2021 10:37 AM

This is the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen. I know this with the kind of certainty that’s only possible in dreams, and I also know some divine truth is there, if only I can see exactly what the image is.

A short story by Leigh Alexander.
posted by skymt (9 comments total)

Thanks for posting this--it reminds me of "Landslide by Fleetwood Mac except it’s playing through your car’s old radio cassette player as you drive alone through the desert at night. As far as you can tell, the nearest human life has got to be wherever that distant thunder is rolling in," etc., etc. (links that seem to fail, though searches work). But I really like both what it reminded me of and how it's used in the story.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:55 AM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

I first heard of "The Madonna of Port Lligat" thanks to Larry Niven's novel _Protector_. I *do* think the 1949 version is one of the most beautiful paintings I've ever seen, and that's a hill I'll happily die on.

I've never read any of Alexander's other work and only know her from the GamerGate shitshow, but the style of this is amazing and the story is tight.
posted by hanov3r at 12:41 PM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

Another vote of thanks for providing this. Every couple of years of so Leigh Alexander pops into my awareness for having done something awesome, starting with this article on her formative years playing Adventure , through here, doing narrative design on Reigns:Her Majesty and IIRC its sequel, most recently here, with another enjoyable tech related short, and now this, which I think is some of her best. The way aspects of art described and the narrative itself fold in on each other just appeals to something in how my brain works.
posted by Sparx at 2:23 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

I hate how pretentious it sounds to say zeitgeist, but I often have that feeling about Alexander's work. An apparently effortless capturing of the (or at least a) zeitgeist that no doubt actually takes a ton of work. And such tight sentences. Previously, another short story of hers.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 3:13 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

In the virtual Met of the story the protagonist cannot see the painting because "Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded."

When the painting's identity was revealed, I searched for it and ended up at the actual Met's page for the painting.

Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
posted by justkevin at 4:04 PM on March 11, 2021 [12 favorites]

I spent so much time looking through various surrealist and abstract Madonna portraits back when she was asking about this on twitter that I made a pinterest board specifically for them.
posted by CarolynG at 4:17 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

rhamphorhynchus - I feel the same way. Alexander is among the keenest observers of our present tech filtered reality. I think about her Lo-Fi Let's Play of Neuromancer a lot, where she spoke of the "cyberspace world" she imagined as a kid, and how it stacked up to the one she grew up to experience.

This story is great, and heartbreaking. I hope she does more fiction.
posted by EatTheWeek at 4:35 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

I was hoping that the most beautiful painting would be Klein's "The Void," which is one of the most beautiful paintings I have ever seen, and the blue really does suggest the Madonna, which is something I had never realized before. (It is also a painting which can't be viewed online.)
posted by surlyben at 5:26 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

So . I'm pretty sure that Alexander has somehow tapped directly into my brain and is telling everyone about me right now. I went and read her other short story, The Soft Truth, and those are my thoughts? I watch those videos. I get tricked. I cant find the original, and they're just a endless slalom of the same content cropped differently with terrible EDM music playing over it and there's no prime. You want to be satisfied and all you get is the sense that these things never really happened, 15 collage videos just appear simultaneously, each borrowing from the one next to it in a circular fashion, a sourceless ouroboros of mockery
posted by FirstMateKate at 12:24 PM on March 12, 2021