I had conceived of a show based on the letter A.

There would be several large paintings of a single A against solid color backgrounds, each A rendered in a different typeface, some elaborate and ornamented, others simple and graphic, all of them beautiful, I planned.

I had an idea for a long narrow strip of text, some appropriate piece of writing, running throughout the gallery in which all of the letters would be blacked out except for appearances of the letter A.  And then I had a better idea, to have a writer friend, William Ricky, write a story for me.  Then I would copy it out by hand on a long roll of paper, in pencil, a single line of text, and then I would erase his story leaving only the As.  

I rang up Bill to tell him my idea.  Over dinner, we discussed it.

He didn’t know the reference to Rauschenberg’s famous erasure of a deKooning drawing but he appreciated it when I explained it to him.

“I’m no deKooning,” he said.

“Sure.  And I’m not Rauschenberg.”

He liked the idea.  We discussed it thoroughly.  It was my hope that his story would be an original story, unpublished, and that he would agree not to write it again or tell it to anyone after I erased it.  I wanted the story to be the only copy, the way that deKooning’s drawing was the only copy of his drawing, and that after he gave it to me, it would be gone.

“I’m willing,” said Bill.  “On the one hand, it lets me off the hook, because no one will ever know whether the story was any good.”

“On the other hand, it might be.  Or might have been.”

“Did anyone ever see deKooning’s drawing before Rauschenberg erased it?”

“My understanding is that it was something that deKooning had in his studio.  So somebody might have seen it there, but it was never exhibited or sold or anything.  I don’t even recollect what the subject was.  Probably a drawing of a woman because deKooning was famous for his paintings of women.  Of course Rauschenberg saw it, before he erased it.  And deKooning, of course.”

“Should I write a story about a woman, then?  Just to maintain the parallel?”

“No.  Well, that’s up to you,” I answered.  “I mean the parallel for us ought to be that Rauschenberg didn’t tell deKooning what to draw.”

“Or I could write a story about deKooning and, you know, how he came to feel later after losing his drawing.”

“Sure,” I answered.  “But you know, it could be a story that fits with the theme of the rest of the show:  the letter A.”

“A story about a letter…”  He took a sip of wine.

“Or a story about beginnings,” I said.  That’s what I was thinking of.  Alpha and Omega.  Letter A as the symbol of creation.”

“That makes me think of that Borges story, “The Aleph”, where he finds a place in a friend’s basement where every point in the universe can be observed simultaneously.”

“I don’t know it.”

“You should look it up.”

“And there’s another book, I’m thinking of.  It’s by a French writer, Peric, I think, or something like that.  In English it’s called “A Void”.  It’s a novel written entirely without using the letter E.  And amazingly the English translation does the same thing.”

“Wow.”

“I know.  ’A Void,’ get it?  It’s amazing.  And the story itself is self-referential.  I don’t remember it exactly but it’s some kind of a mystery about a man who feels that something is missing in his life, or has gone missing in the world, but he cannot name it.  Of course, it’s the letter E that is missing.”

“Cool.  But my show will be the opposite.  One letter left after all the others have gone.”

“Maybe that’s what my story should be about.  Loss.  Loneliness.  What remains as the world around us vanishes.”

He grew thoughtful.  I could see his inspiration beginning to work.  I decided I’d said enough.  I paid for our dinner and we said goodbye.

But his inspiration had made me think of another piece I wanted for my show.

The letter A is also the name of a musical note.  I called up another friend of mine, the composer John Jaspers.  I told him my idea over the phone.  I asked John to suggest a musician who could perform something for me.  He gave me the name of a violinist for the LA Phil he knew who he thought would be willing, Emily Clark.

I called Emily and she invited me to meet her in her home.

I drove over to Echo Park.  She had a small home she shared with her husband and a dog:  small living room, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor, bedrooms above.  She practiced in the living room, crowded by a grand piano.  Her husband, a sound engineer, worked for one of the studios.

I told her I was imagining an audio piece for my show, to be played on speakers during the gallery hours.  Again, following Ron’s idea, it would be a piece of absence.  I was thinking that we could use an existing piece of music and then have her play on her violin only the note A, when it occurred, leaving the rest of the music silent.

She looked at me blankly.  “Yikes,” she said.  “That’s going to be annoying.”

“Is it?” I asked.  “Could it be played, beautifully?”  I had imagined it could be lovely, like the repeated sound of an insect on a warm evening.  Or a wind chime striking the same note divorced from any rhythm or structure.  I described what I was thinking.

She had her violin with her.  She played an A.  “It’s the note an orchestra tunes to.  It’s maybe the most heard note in all of music for that reason.”

She played it a few times, loudly, softly, fiercely, sweetly.  I think she began to see how it could be done and was becoming intrigued.

“You can play an A on an open string, like when you’re tuning, or also on the other strings with fingering.”  She showed me.  “It sounds different.  And there are As in other octaves, too.”  She played it lower, and then higher, and then higher again.

“No,” I said.  “I like just the first A.  The one you tune to.”

“A 440,” she said, “meaning it vibrates at four hundred and forty beats per second.  I could just play random As for you all day,” she was thoughtful.  “But I have the feeling you want something more purposeful.”

“Yes.  An existing piece of music but with every note but the As taken out.”

She started thinking.  “Something long, so it won’t have to be repeated too often.  Not that anyone would notice, I suppose.  Maybe a symphony.”

“That sounds good.”

“A symphony in A, so there would be lots of As.”

“OK.  But I don’t mind silence.  But whatever you like.”

“That makes me think of Beethoven’s 7^th.  The first movement is in A major and the second shifts to A minor.  I think Mendelsohn’s Italian Symphony is also in A.  I’m sure there are many others.”

“No, I like Beethoven.  That feels right.”

“OK.  God this is going to be a tough assignment.”

“I appreciate it.  Of course, I’ll pay you.”

“Yes, you will!”  She laughed.  “OK.  I’ll get the violin part from the Phil’s library.  Maybe I’ll play with a click track to make sure I stay on beat…”

“It doesn’t have to be perfect.  It’s the idea, not the execution.  But do take it seriously.”

“I will.  No.  I get it.  I suppose there’s some way with modern technology that I could just play the whole thing and have a computer remove all the notes that don’t land within the right frequency.”  But she shook off the idea.  “That’s no fun.”

She went on, “And I guess I’ll play the As the way I would if I were actually playing the score:  open strings when that’s the way I would do it, fingered when fingered.”

“Yes,” I agreed.  “I like that.”

“That will give a little variety to the sound without changing the pitch.”

“I like that.  The way my paintings will all be As but in different fonts.”

So we made a deal.  We agreed on a payment.  She said she would have her husband do the recording so it would be good quality.  I agreed to pay him, too.

The night of the gallery opening was beautiful.  I had made a dozen paintings of just a single large A in different fonts against different colored backgrounds.  They were as beautiful as I had hoped and I thought they would sell.

And as I’d worked on them, I had come up with other variations on the theme.  I made other large As in the gothic style “illuminated” with gold leaf and paintings woven in and around the letter with illustrations of things that began with an A initial.  One an illuminated A with animals:  aardvark, alligator.  Another with flowers:  asters, anemones, amaryllis, and so on.

I had hoped to find a set of report cards with all-A students.  But I never could find actual cards, so I made up my own.  I made thirty of them, mocked up to look as though they might have been printed a hundred years ago, and then blacked out everything except for the A grades, straight As for every imaginary student, then arranged them in a grid 5 across by 6 up and down.

I made another grid of large letter As that I had commissioned a classroom of first graders to make for me, each in their own handwriting.  (My sister-in-law is an elementary school teacher.)

I made a pair of videos.  One of dozens of persons saying the letter A, cut together, and then another with the same people saying A but held out as long as they could.

I made another painting:  chalkboard gray with row after row of repeated cursive As in white, like an ersatz Cy Twombly.  I thought that would sell, too.

Ron’s story I wrote out neatly on a long roll of adding machine paper.  I carefully erased it leaving only the As.  It began with a capital A, so that remained, then visibly rubbed out pencil marks interrupted only by the occasional a, or A.  I tacked the roll across the wall just above the top of the paintings starting at the frame of the front door of the gallery.  It ran all through the gallery and back around to the front door, where, I was pleased to see, there was still more story, so I left the end of it rolled up, a double hiding of the story.

And Emily’s recording of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony with all but the A 440 of the first violin part silenced, played throughout the evening.  Her husband, the sound engineer, came in to set up the playback and speakers, which he loaned for the occasion.  Her recording lasted about 40 minutes, so he set it up to play on loop during the gallery hours.

For several passages there are quickly repeated notes, like Morse code, when several sixteenth note As are isolated out of a repeated figure.  Other times there are long, held As.  And there is much silence, too, although there’s more sound than I imagined.  First violinists don’t get a lot of rest during a symphony.  And A is one of only twelve notes, so it gets played a lot, not one of twenty-six alphabet letters.

The sound was haunting, not annoying.  Her playing was sensitive, and as accurate as she could make it, she told me.  We played the recording softly, but loud enough to be heard among the chatter of the gallery guests and the tinkle of champagne glasses.  Insistent, but also hesitant.  Disappearing into the buzz, or gone entirely into silence and then strongly appearing again:  A, A, A.

The afternoon Ron presented his story to me he brought it in person to my studio.  He said he could have just emailed it, but that it felt too important to not be delivered in person.  I told him I could have come to his apartment, the way that Rauschenberg came to deKooning, but Ron said he wanted to see the paintings I was working on.

I showed him the As in different fonts.  I’d finished the illuminated As, too, and he was delighted with the animals and flowers, and the one with vegetables:  asparagus and artichoke.

He told me that his story had come out well and that he almost regreted sacrificing it for me.  I told him he didn’t have to give it up, that he could substitute a different one, if he liked, or just not do it at all.  My original idea had been to take an existing story rather than a specially written one, after all, and I could just go back to that.

But he said, no, he wanted me to have the story and I’m glad he didn’t change his mind.  He said that the regret and the loss he was feeling were part of the story, too, that the whole experience, the writing, and the erasing, and our friendship was the story, not the subject of the story, but the content of the story.  I said I understood.  He said I would get it when I read what he had written.  I said I thought I understood already.

I read it after he left.  And then I read it again as I copied it out on to the long roll of adding machine tape.  And then I read it a third time as I slowly erased it, all but the As.

I won’t tell you the story.  But it was beautiful.  A gift.  From him to me, and a gift to creation.  Wistful, but not sad.  True.

The story began:  “All alone…”