SCHOFFMAN: PAINTER by Currado Malaspina

THE BREAD OF LIFE

Any pleasure that David Schoffman may take from life will only be that which manages to slip between the gallops of recollection. He lives with the murmur of futility. He paints in order to recover the ignorance that precedes memory.

When he studied with the writer, Allejo Abulafia, the ageless visionary and grand master of Ladino prose, he discovered the inevitability of sadness. Abulafia, who lived for many years among the flaming dunes of southern Morocco, saw life as something entombed in predestination. To him, our personal histories were merely grim rocks of insignificance. It was the artist’s bitter duty to impersonate meaning through creative introspection. The products of that puny introspection should be fit to rest upon Earth’s chest with a noble dignity. If it passes that test, then one has created Art.

Abulafia’s imagination, in his later years, was a dry river. Schoffman told me once that it was his mentor’s weakness for atonement that proved to be his undoing. “Be quick, before you are crucified by time,” were the last words Abulafia wrote in a journal entry titled “Conclusions.”