Chapter 7
Scale

Sarah came into the light slowly, opening her eyes at a very deliberate pace so as not to upset her body’s tenuous equilibrium. She felt that her skin was merely a sack filled with straw, and groaned as soon as she tried to move her limbs. Her memory of what had happened was fluctuating, floating in and out of her awareness like a radio channel drenched with static. In fact, she could not be sure even now of where she was, or if what she was looking at was the canopy of pale, sunlit trees or plaster on the ceiling assuming dreaming patterns in her half-conscious state.

Awaking more fully, she sat up and realized that she was indeed back at the apartment, her clothes caked with dried mud and her hair in disarray. Rather than have to explain to Michelle, she stood up quickly and rushed to her closet to pick out fresh clothes. No sooner had she put them on and stepped out of her bedroom than Michelle, who had been sitting at the breakfast table nursing a cup of coffee in her hands, looked up at her askance.

“Would you mind telling me what it was this time?” Michelle asked very quietly.

“I – well. I don’t remember, to be honest.”

“You were gone for a whole day. I was on the verge of calling the police to send out a search party. Sarah...”

“What? So I make nighttime trips. I’m still on time with the rent, aren’t I? I do my share of chores. Do I have to tell you where I am every instant as though you were my mother?”

“Don’t get so defensive, Sarah. I was worried!”

“I’m sorry. I’ve just been a little, well, confused lately, let us say.”

“That much is clear. Look, we’re still on time for Literature of the African Diaspora, if you finish getting cleaned up fast. You’re lucky the professor is so lenient despite his fast pace, or you would already have been in big trouble.”

“Alright, give me just a minute.”

The pair set off to the university shortly thereafter. Sarah liked very much the urban campus, incorporated into the natural flow of the city just like any other set of buildings. The English department was housed alongside drama and psychology in a lovely edifice of Art Deco design, sharply contrasting with the new and, to her, garish home of the math and science departments, a Deconstructivist work that lay alongside like an uncompleted angular mar on the architectural landscape. The postmodern aesthetic was one that she agreed with up to a point, after which she found it indulgent and often simply unattractive. She acknowledged its importance nonetheless, but wished that it would remain a little more consistent with the actual needs of its users.

Sarah and Michelle entered the classroom together, sitting in a row near the middle of the small classroom. The former waved to her friends Adam and Jack, who were so engaged in an earnest, heated discussion of the merit of Zora Neale Hurston’s oeuvre in light of her conservative, counter-productive ideology that they took no notice.

Professor Daly walked into the room with a warm smile; his tightly-curled hair was braided in sharp cornrows and thin glasses covered his incisive brown eyes yet were unable to lessen their intensity.

“Hello, everyone. Thus far in our investigations, we’ve focused on black American authors, but today, I hoped that we might discuss the Afro-Caribbean writers, both those writing in Spanish and in English.”

On hearing this, Sarah was thrilled. She had long been an aficionado of Nicolás Guillén, an Afro-Cuban poet who wrote compellingly in the tradition of the music of the island, much as the Americans had adopted jazz into their poems. His depictions of the santería religion, more properly called Lukumí or “friends” in the Yoruba language, were equally intriguing, although this work was not without its flaws and he eventually moved on from these experiments later in his career. His young creations, though, were full of life and showed promise, if not complete success in all their aspects.

The word “friends” for the belief system reminded her of the Quakers; the two shared at least the characteristic of being derived from Christian tradition. Besides this, the word was unusually appropriate in the context of the course, given that the majority among the many children of the African Diaspora saw themselves as connected within the fabric of a vast, pan-global group, sharing an identity and heritage that had brought the classical European world to its knees whether its inhabitants were aware of it or no. It was this massive network which, filtered through the regional and cultural heritage of every place where Africans came to reside, had resulted in the cross-cultural sharing that produced such richness and depth in all aspects of society.

It was fascinating how one man, such as Guillén, could become a symbol of the entire movement and artistic blending of cultures in her mind, although she knew well that there were countless others just as important. A host of personal mythologies must have arisen around this and so many other elements of life, but she was not privy to any but her own. She wondered at this distance that opened up between people as soon as they were born, a gulf of associations and idiosyncrasies into which it was not merely difficult, but actually impossible to make the leap, diving into the mind and being of another with total abandon. Such unmitigated contact could be alarming, if not destructive, to anyone brave enough to attempt it.

The professor’s voice wrapped the students tightly, surrounding them with its powerful presence. It conjured a tapestry of words, flowing from the islands and waters of the warm, fecund sea far to the southeast, like a breeze or a quiet, luminous breath, enveloping their minds in the spirit of the Caribbean in a way that was almost visceral. Everyone in the class was hushed and attentive to his imagistic oration, a narrative that transcended the individuals involved and cut to the core of the region, delving deep into the liquid mantle upon which the land merely rested like a thin blanket and drawing up a volcanic spume that would harden into purest obsidian. The glittering pieces, cracked and brittle from their sudden cooling, would reflect the face of a girl gathering the linens from the line, surrounded by an azure sky in a painting like one of Gauguin’s but with more sincerity if not sheer beauty.

It had to end eventually, like any enchantment, but by the time class had finished, Sarah was far gone, bathing in what she imagined suddenly to be the mythical waters of origin. Her paintings had no power to compel in this fashion, she thought. How could she ever acquire the means to inspire others in this fashion? Her experience in the woods was still too close, too massive to be interpreted and the conclusions therein put into practice; like the oracle, she had experienced a heady, overwhelming contact with a world much larger than her own, and had no way to directly govern the ways in which this came to make itself known.

The answer to her need was of course that elusive beast, adulthood. Sarah prodded it continually out of a sense of curiosity, but had no way to make it her own, to comprehend its meaning or to identify its sources. She could not deal with her memories fully until she acquired it, however. It tantalized her to the point of obsession and beyond, yet there was no way to speed up the process. At least she had never entertained the illusion that it would fall into her lap one day when she was older, or that the terrible knowledge she would gain would be palatable after all. For it would be terrible, of that she was certain.

Sarah bid farewell to her friends and decided to take a walk down to the water yet again. This time she did not feel the perverse compulsion to run forward, hurling herself in, but instead a curious crackling, as though she were able to feel the countless electromagnetic waves spreading through her body, making her every hair stand on end and her cells experience a wash of energy. It was an invigorating sensation, a lesser echo of the electric forest wherein she had grasped some kind of enlightenment and let it slip through her fingers. Only here, she felt, would she ever be able have such a experience. In what little traveling she had done, she had found other cities too constrictive, too gritty or too unattractive to meet her standards. There was no question that these, also, were worthwhile in their own right, but she had been lucky and found her home in the place she had never left, with an intuitive sense that her proximity here was not merely beneficial but necessary, though for what reason she did not know.

It occurred to her that one of the things that was so appealing about the city was its great size and variety. She could never be happy in a town any less than half its size, for that would mean half the number of stories to tell, half the number of people that would alight like dragonflies skimming the pond of her life and settling on a reed before departing again. On the other hand, she would not like to be someplace ten times as large, for the masses would deluge her and make it hard to find a center she could rely upon, giving her a sense of rootlessness that she would rather avoid. It was a perfect balance for someone of her disposition, and she hoped that whatever life had in store, she would be able to stay, or at the very least return to the place that had given birth to her emotional and mental self.

She dreamed of this self expanding wide, encompassing the ocean and all the fantastic creatures within. She was not a girl, but a vast outpouring of seawater, flooding the streets, swelling again and coming down from the sky, turning the great assorted buildings of the Bay into an enormous submarine ruin. She noted how the abandoned houses were swum through by a menagerie of curious sea creatures a hundred years hence. The Golden Gate Bridge was now unimpressive, a pathway leading to nowhere, surrounded by a watery barrier on all sides, the bottom littered with spirits broken and disappointed. Her oceanic eyes opened from out of the books in every library branch in the city, surveying her domain with a magisterial air. Now there was no limitation to any creation she could envision; every possible masterwork would be generated by the patterns of light on water at her surface, never seen by human eyes, unrecorded by time and memory yet still complete in their perfection. A thrill ran through her as the wind picked up above, a naturalistic tale to enthrall the senses and impress on its observers the infinite possibility of creation.

Other days might have seen Sarah turning away from such unbridled fancy, but the words of the professor had worked their way into her thoughts and, just like the water before her, assumed an elemental force to move her into another realm entirely, if only for the present. It was for this reason that she was not at all surprised to discover that she had a completely changed perception of the city around her. She felt several times her ordinary height thanks to the success of the effort she had made in expanding her self-concept, which had extended to taking over her conscious mind as well as the lower levels of awareness; she thought of Walt Whitman containing his multitudes, and laughed suddenly. Even to an outside observer, it would appear that she had undergone some cathartic and transformative event which made her eyes and skin flush with inner illumination, made her hyperkinetic and jostling with some concealed activity, despite the utter simplicity and dubious importance of what had happened. The nonevent, the fantasia of the day past assumed a new significance with each passing moment, and she was at once elated and perturbed by its implications both imagined and real.

Passing through intersections with blithe unconcern, she continued west until she came to Washington Square. The greenery was an inspiration. She remembered a meal in a nearby restaurant, looking out on the park through the glass. A breakfast, made with scones, fresh raspberry jam, and strong black tea with cream. It had been the most delicious repast of which she had ever partaken, and not only thanks to the care taken in preparation. This tiny park was nothing compared to the massive Muir Woods, but it loomed just as large in her thoughts. She stepped into the center of the field and peered northeast. The famed Coit Tower lay there, atop Telegraph Hill, and she imagined a web radiating outward from it, tiny filaments glistening and flowing gently over the city, protecting it from harm in an all-encasing cocoon. She was tempted to lie down on the grass and rest a while in the placid warmth of midday, but refrained.

How was it that she was granted the privilege and luxury of coming ever closer to that so-desired epiphany at this time? Nothing had changed, effectively. She was no more successful an artist than the time at which her strange nocturnal journeys had begun, nor had she incorporated anyone new into her circle of friends and acquaintances other than the enigmatic bank teller who had refused to tell her anything of significance. Yet she felt something coming, a major surge down the pipeline foretold by a gradual heightening of the waves that might become a towering tsunami at any instant.

Even if she experienced more and more peculiar events, there was no reason that she need constrain herself to the whims of these external influences in order to live her life. She would not grow stronger or wiser by simply submitting to the force of destiny, fate, or whatever overarching concept was striving so hard to control her actions almost against her will. The only conclusion, then, was to take responsibility for the development of her own life, with no more procrastination or waiting. She begged forgiveness for leaving something of this importance up to chance, before realizing the futility of this and stopping her mind’s tongue. An interval passed while she contemplated the circularity of her situation; if she had been fated to decide to take control over her personal advancement, was this not itself the proof of a sort of predestination? Yet this was meaningless; unknowable states such as this were best relegated to the position of all those philosophical considerations which had vexed great minds that might have been better set to the more pragmatic problems in front of them. Then again, even this accusation must have been leveled before, and judging from the number of people who seriously confronted such issues as the existence of fate and destiny, there was a marked decline in this sort of fruitless contemplation.

Perhaps the greatest enemy to philosophy had been the rise of academia, she mused. With the existence of an explicit university culture built around the game of intramural politics and the rush for publication, some of the brightest minds were trapped into the confines of a system which had in large part forgotten the true value of education and lost its way, somehow, wandering into some obscure alley while their more down-to-earth contemporaries marched past on Main Street, pressed in among the masses where they had realized lay their true place. It would be a great day indeed when the university assumed its mantle once again of a place for educating those who would do a service to society.

A mote of cynicism arose in Sarah’s consciousness, and she reflected on the fact that it was obviously, patently true that certain individuals simply were not destined to have an impact on society at large. She had long known herself to be among these, for there was no way one could look at her childhood and say, “This one will go far.” It was merely her misfortune to be afflicted with the awareness of this fate, and the desire to undo it by any means or craft that she could acquire. She thought again of her idol Frida Kahlo; if Sarah Landon painted the jagged, contradictory landscape of her mind in such a fashion, who could bear to look at it? More importantly, who would care? No longer did she allow herself any illusions on this front; she would merely trust in her aesthetic and rational judgment, asserting the validity and importance of her work as soon as she could believe in it herself. This last caveat was the one remaining issue in her quest for validation, far more than any technical deficiency or lack of experience that could assail her.

She knew only that she must become larger than herself, that others might find among her growing store of emotional and spiritual wealth something that they too could treasure. It would take work, but she was sure that in time a certain relic would surface from deep within, this time with the force of skill in realization that would elevate it and make it worthy of duplication in as many minds as were capable of receiving its message. This alone might give her the satisfaction that would quiet the urges inside her. E-mail: vokuro@adelphia.net