Having taken a seat on the outdoor stage, I checked out the pool of freshmen on the Fibers patio below. A few girls pulled on my eye, a few on my lip, but this one girl, why, she'd-a pulled me clean off stage had I not dug in my heels. Oh, sure, she was petite, brunette, pretty face, my type, but that wasn't what pulled on me.
I pulled out my pad and pen, wrote, "I saw a girl, and now I want to write something."
What I wanted to write, of course, was a word or two that would blow away the gods of literature as I knew them. But, knowing them, first I needed to divine what it was, exactly, that pulled on me.
I put pen to paper. "What pulled on me, I think, was the way the girl spoke, shaping her words with her hand." I looked up. I looked down. "Then again, there was no little pull in the way the girl listened, stirring her pony tail with her finger."
Subjecting myself to pull for the better part of the lunch hour, I took note of an odd pattern. Though all of twenty-one, she kept turning towards those thirty-five and older. Perhaps she turned to her elders for advice.
I put pen to paper: "Yes, youth, seek out the advice of your elders. Not for the advice--one only learns from ones own mistakes, but to give the poor elders a break from beating themselves up over all the wrong turns they'd made in their youth."
Wait; I was an elder myself now. Why was I always forgetting that? Perhaps because I was always working at forgetting that. Sure, there was that one wrong turn I'd made in my youth, but . . .
I put pen to paper: "What elder bangs his head against yesteryear's boulder, when he can reverse aging by stoning this year's youth?"
I panned the pool of twenty-somethings. Yes, ha, ha, look at the self-perceived selves, grinding away, trying to be everyone but themselves. And that's when it came to me; why this one girl pulled on me--she wasn't trying.
How rare; a twenty-something who had already settled into her self. Which begged the question: What had this high human been put on this low earth to do? Answer: Something to do with me, no doubt.
Standing back-to-back with my girl was Ezra, Apolena's Photo Prof. Perhaps I needed to have a word with Ezra. Working to come up with that word, I eyed the arc in front of Ezra; the arc that was always in front of Ezra--the arc of twenty-something women competing to lock up the panning eye of the distinguished professor.
That word came to me then; the name of an artist Ezra had advised me to check out. No, I hadn't checked out the artist yet, but knowing Ezra, that wasn't important. Pocketing my pad and pen, I walked off stage.
"Ezra," I said, taking up a slot in the arc of young women, "can I have a word with you?"
"Sure," Ezra said, shooing away his worshipers, "What's up?"
"That artist of yours: Goldsworthy. I checked him out. You were right, his stuff is . . . is like . . ."
"Phenomenal, yes," Ezra said, and, skirting all cross examination, started lecturing nature this, found object that.
I nodded Ezra on, and with each nod I jacked my head higher that I might get my eye on the stirrings on the other side of Ezra.
Of course, having jacked my eye high enough, I took a blow to the eye. I couldn't believe it; a freshman boy had moved in on my girl. "Really, dude," he called her, "you got to check this out." And away he went with my girl, back towards the stage.
It took some creative coaxing, but I got lecturing Ezra to follow me stage-ward. How pathetic, the fresh boy was showing my girl a section of wall. Get a clue, greenhorn, you want to show a girl a moving sunset, not cast concrete.
Then again, my girl seemed genuinely interested in the concrete wall. So interested, I took an interest in the wall myself.
Yes, there was something in that wall. Something in the way of spirit. The spirit of a bird, I decided. I wanted the spirit to exude blue heron--I was partial to blue. But seeing how there was no blue, I decided I'd go with the white pelican. Yes, the beak was definitely more pelican than heron. Now, what omen, exactly, was the pelican messaging?
Hard to read an omen, though, when you got the big hand of a greenhorn going into the small of the back of the girl who had been put on this low earth to pull on you and you alone.
Maybe I needed to have a word with my girl. I was raising a boot to do as much, when another word came to me: Jealousy. What, monk Anton, jealous? I dropped my boot that I might present a defense.
"Clearly, your Honor, this isn't about jealousy. Why? Because this isn't about a boy stealing a girl that isn't his. What is it about? Why, clearly, this is about a bastard who sees fit to steal a section of wall that isn't his--this favorite section of wall of mine."
OK, that was a stretch.
OK, maybe I'd never noticed this section of wall before, but, still, I'd been sweeping under the entire wall for years. That made the wall my wall, not his.
A good thing to turn to when you have no defense is fiction. So I told myself the story of how the wall came tumbling down then. How the greenhorn's birdbrains got squashed like a bug next. How the monk stepped up to the plate in the end, swept the girl off her feet with a line like--
Ezra nudged me. "Infectious, isn't it?"
"Infectious?"
"The Oz-eyed freshmen."
I panned the patio of Oz-eyed freshmen.
"Hear 'em?" Ezra said, cocking an ear. "They're recounting every fork in their yellow brick road to art school."
"Funny," I said, cocking a neck, "they're all looking up. What do you suppose they see up there?"
"Pie."
I liked pie. But, no, I couldn't see the pie in the sky for the meringue in my ear--the sweet voice of The Woman Who Wasn't Trying.
A crusty voice got me looking her way. Say, things were looking up; the fresh boy was gone and in his place, a woman, thirty-five-and-older. I listened in. Though my girl's clean voice registered well enough, I couldn't make out her words for the forty-five-and-older Ezra.
"In truth, that's why I teach. Every Fall the new hopefuls arrive, each believing they and they alone are to become the next Stieglitz or something. And before I can think better of it, I've caught the bug myself, head for the classroom, believing I and I alone can turn them into as much."
"Stieglitz?" I said, "Wasn't he--"
"Phenomenal, yes." And with Ezra lecturing Georgia O'Keeffe this, Gertrude Stein that, I checked out the two female freshmen--one old, one young--each beav-eager to dive into this new chapter of their lives.
Say, maybe that's what I needed: A new chapter in my life. And getting my eyes back on what inspired me--that ponytail getting stirred, I worked on my new chapter.
Chapter, hell. What I had separating my ribs was the better part of a novel. What was I doing, idling the day away at Orientation--an event I wasn't even required to attend--when I could be at home at my laptop, banging out that great work I knew I had in me. That great work I'd been threatening to write since college. That Great Work the earth's ass would be hard-pressed to be saved without.
It came to me then; what this singular woman was here on earth to do. A realization so phenomenal, yes, I had to cut out on Ezra mid-lecture.
Back on stage, I put pen to paper: "Art may be great. The artist who made it may be great. But neither is phenomenal. What's phenomenal is the muse who drives the artist to go through all the hell it takes to create the art that, without the muse, would never have gotten off the ground."
I looked up to thank the word gods. "Thanks for the muse, gods. But mostly thanks for stepping in, keeping me from passing a word with my muse--the biggest no-no in the Muse Book."
My thanks received, the giving gods rewarded me with a word: Puissance. I didn't know what the word meant, but, boy, the precious way it pulled on my lips sure captured the effects my muse had on me.
I was about to write the word down--so I could look it up, but I had something more pressing to get down just now; the age-old code every artist must stick to who allied himself to a muse. That sure-fire code I'd extrapolated upon in a paper I'd written studying medieval chivalry in college. That die-hard code of courtly love I thought it an honor and a privilege to stick to.
And, oh, how hard I put pen to paper that I might make the code stick this time, gol-dammit.
Of course, etching code that deep is bound to cost one--that precious word the giving word gods had gifted me; gone.
****
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