What We Can't Know - The Unknown Losses
- Michel Weatherall
- Jan 2
- 4 min read
For Christmas, my daughter got me a deck of cards for a stocking stuffer.... and not any ordinary deck of cards: Felix Nacht's Gallery of Hallucinations Oracle.
Is it a game? Is it tarot deck? What is it? Yes, yes, I know. I'd never heard of it either.
...and that is the point.
It is a collection of 54 paintings, presented in a 4.1" by 2.95" card deck format. Creative, artistic, haunting, shockingly beautiful. The first unspoken thoughts that races through one's mind are, Who is this artist? Why have I never heard of him? and I am so uncouth?
Felix Nacht's story is a sad one.
German artist Felix Nacht painted an extensive body of work during the 1920's-30's. working in obscurity for his entire life, was discovered at an estate sale and salvaged from the trash.
During the Spring of 2024, the Fenwood Bureau of Artifacts unexpectedly found a unique estate sale in nearby Eastbury, New York. There, they met a woman who lived in the house with her elderly (recently deceased) mother, and was now selling the house and all its contents. When asked if she had any antiques for sale, a dilapidated shed on the property was revealed.
The Fenwood Bureau agents were amazed to discover a treasure trove of bizarre paintings stacked inside, which she claimed were "utterly worthless" to her.
The woman told the sad story of her grandfather, Felix Nacht, a shy artist who immigrated from Germany to America in 1919. Once here, he found work as a mail clerk in an insurance company and dreamed of becoming a respected artist one day. Sadly, he struggled with this idea because he always felt his work wasn't good enough and often thought of giving it up.
Each long day, Felix worked his mundane job and then used the night to unleash his creativity. The deeper he explored his prolific imagination, the more he felt his ideas originated from another realm of reality. Sadly, he never had the confidence to show his art to anyone and worked for years in secrecy. During this time, he fell madly in love with a woman named Marta Bachner, who he portrayed in many of his artworks.
Unfortunately, Marta was cruel and didn't love him the same way, but used their relationship to fulfill her need to belittle people and make herself feel important. She often ridiculed Felix and his art, calling him a "Weird little man with even weirder ideas", and proclaimed he would never amount to anything more than a lowly clerk. Regardless, Felix loved Marta with all his heart, and for reasons unknown, she was his muse.
After toiling for decades in obscurity, Marta's nasty words finally penetrated Felix's heart. Around 1938, he abandoned his art and locked the door to his studio. He quickly descended into depression and madness, which lasted until his untimely death in 1946.
After her story, the woman asked if we still wanted this "stuff," if not, it was going straight into the trash. The entire collection was purchased for $200.
Along with his paintings also was acquired Felix's extensive journals and sketchbooks.
If interested, more can be learned here with a free downloadable PDF.
. . .
This story and history is incredibly powerful and tragic to me.
As a Creative, as an author, a musician, poet, artist, and publisher, this story is the absolute worst fear I carry. It was a cautionary tale - a hypothetical and rhetorical one, a mathematical probability - up until today - but now, sadly, it has come into the realm of existence with Felix Nacht.
We are all our own worst critics. Imposter syndrome, self-doubt, self-destructive impulses. That voice that tells you, you can't, you're not good enough, not valuable enough, not skilled enough.
At one point or another, with nearly every author I have signed onto BKP, or spoken with, I tell this hypothetical story. The greatest works every written in the history of humanity, but being lost - never to be seen or read - due to our own self-doubt, nay-sayers, or predatory businesses or vanity publishers. The tragedy is beyond words.
The loss and crushing of an individual's dreams - the loss of these works are a loss to humanity itself.
It is the nightmare of this kind of story that guides Broken Keys Publishing & Press, and myself, to adopt the model we currently follow.
BKP chooses to be a facilitator of literature rather than a gatekeeper of it. We believe it is the readers in our society whose job it is to determine good from poor literature, not the publishers.
Whereas traditional publishing houses play gatekeeper, determining what they decree as worthy or not...and historically, they've been grievously wrong.
H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Emily Brontë, and the list goes on. They struggled to see publication in their lifetimes, many struggling in poverty, many dying in poverty, only now, decades later, to be considered Literary Masters. And these are the lucky few. (Lucky for us, not them). These are the ones who managed not to fall through the cracks into obscurity.
How many literacy masters have fallen through the cracks but never benefited from a Felix-Nacht-like postmortem rescue? The very nature of the question forbids an answer. We can't know what we don't know. The Unknown unknowns.
Although we can't know what we've lost and will never see, we can know these losses exist. We have ample examples of these near-misses. Akin to the military logic of carpet-bombing, and brother to the sacred geometry of chance, we don't need direct evidence of their existence. It's a mathematically certainty. It's the abandoned, lonely echo through history that will never be heard.
We are aware, however, of a methodology that contributes to producing them in literature: Publishers playing gatekeepers.
Maybe it's time for a change in our literary landscape.
Maybe the days of the gatekeepers needs to end.
Maybe it's time for the advent of a new publishing model.
Keep up to date with breaking news, new releases
and events, and keep your thumb on
the pulse of Ottawa's literary scene.
Subscribe and follow us on social media -
Comments