An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (23 page)

“What is it, Daniel? New love? Old love? Fear death by water? Riches? Poverty? A new career? Fame after death? What do you see? What's the future?” Olin stood outside the door in the hall, bemused.

“Poverty then riches,” I said. “Class then drink.” I put my hand in my pocket and felt the folded note at the bottom of it. “I'll see you at three.”

I walked down the hall, back to my office. A scent in the air as of an old book opened for the first time in a century.

I wondered how the book I carried in my hand stayed in my hand; I wondered how it didn't fall.

I
WALKED INTO THE CLASSROOM LATE AND CLOSED
THE door behind me. A young woman bent down to take her book from her bag, and as she did so, her blouse fell away from her chest revealing a nipple's dark edge. She sat back up, looked at me, and said “Hello, Professor.” She didn't blush; nor did I.

I walked to the front of the class and sat down at the desk. I put the book and papers on it. The class sat before me, all in their orderly rows.

“What is that?” I asked, noticing something small on the floor near Ishmael's foot. “That, right there,” I asked, pointing.

Ishmael looked on either side of him, and the young woman sitting next to him, the woman whose breast I had just seen, bent over to pick it up. Ishmael watched her as she leaned over and down, then looked suddenly away, embarrassed. She stood up and walked to the desk, her hand held out in front of her; she seemed to me to move slowly, her arm outstretched almost as if in a trance, an initiate into the mysteries, or the one who has decided to initiate me. “Here you are.” She held her hand out palm-side down, so that I had to cup my hand beneath hers, and then in a sudden motion she released all her fingers at once, as if flicking a drop of water from
the tip of each one; I felt the tiny object drop into my hand, warmed by the warmth of her skin. She took two steps backwards still facing me, turned gently around by pivoting on one foot—as if within the mundane time of class and day she had found (we all had unwittingly found ourselves in) some other time, some Arcadian zone that hides itself within the passing minutes of taking attendance and going over the details of the next assignment, some ancient time unpassing within passing time, time that exists but cannot be spoken of, cannot be sensed or claimed, lest at the point of recognition it disappear again, timelessness being casualty to consciousness—walked back to her desk and sat down. I looked down in my hand. Sitting in the crease of a line in my palm was a pearl. I picked it up and held it between two fingers. I felt speechless. I looked out at the class; I looked out at the class with my blank face. “How?—”

“An earring?” Ishmael offered.

“Maybe a ring, a loose setting?” said the woman who had picked it up.

Hearing such rational explanations comforted me. An instant before, the world felt too unreal, or more than real—the appearance of a pearl on the floor of my class an event of almost cosmic bewilderment, as astonishing as a new star appearing in the sky where none had been before, something inexplicable, some brittle line shattered, some edge crossed or fallen over, something rent in the air, making the old world only a nostalgia of what used to be, and offering this new one, where pearls
leaped into existence out of nothingness, falling through a hole in the air. “Of course. Right. A ring or an earring; an earring or a ring. That makes perfect sense.” I said it as if the phrase were a little song. The class laughed uncomfortably. I stood up and put the pearl in my pocket. I grabbed the pile of pages. “You might have noticed an omission in our none-too-carefully crafted book. A missing last page, for example.” I paused, waiting for the class to gripe, but no one complained. “Well, to end the awful suspense, I made copies of the missing page.” I handed the pile to the student sitting closest to me, and watched as it diminished page by page as it wound its way through the class. When everyone had one, I sat back down, opened my book to the page they all held in their hands, and began to read:

As if the butterfly, like the artist, were conscious of something not entirely congenial in the child's nature, it alternately sparkled and grew dim. At length it arose from the small hand of the infant with an airy motion that seemed to bear it upward without an effort, as if the ethereal instincts with which its master's spirit had endowed it impelled this fair vision involuntarily to a higher sphere. Had there been no obstruction, it might have soared into the sky and grown immortal. But its lustre gleamed upon the ceiling; the exquisite texture of its wings brushed against that earthly medium; and a sparkle or two, as of stardust, floated downward and lay glimmering on the carpet. Then the butterfly came fluttering down, and, instead of returning to the infant, was apparently attracted toward the artist's hand
.

“Not so! not so!” murmured Owen Warland, as if his handiwork could have understood him. “Thou has gone forth out of thy master's heart. There is no return for thee.”

With a wavering movement, and emitting a tremulous radiance, the butterfly struggled, as it were, toward the infant, and was about to alight upon his finger; but while it still hovered in the air, the little child of strength, with his grandsire's sharp and shrewd expression in his face, made a snatch at the marvellous insect and compressed it in his hand. Annie screamed. Old Peter Hovenden burst into a cold and scornful laugh. The blacksmith, by main force, unclosed the infant's hand, and found within the palm a small heap of glittering fragments, whence the mystery of beauty had fled forever. And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality
.

As I read I found myself taking the pearl out of my pocket, rubbing it between thumb and fingers. An unconscious motion that mimicked the work of the mind, rolling the object of contemplation around, touching it, to find out what it might be. It was not the pearl that was the mind.

I looked up at the class. A few students were furiously writing in their notebooks. Others gazed down at the floor, or over at the wall, or their eyes kept to one corner unseeing, vision now an internal sense as they pictured
the golden gears and golden dust in the baby's open hand destroyed. Ishmael looked out the window. He looked upset.

I stood up and walked to the front of my desk, and leaned back against it. “Well, someone, tell me what you think.”

I like a silence that thinks itself, this silence of the class listening to itself, to the words no one yet is speaking but which many are sensing, almost hearing, fate or future, the conversation to come.

“I didn't expect it,” a voice called out. I didn't see who spoke.

“Why not?” I asked. “Owen's work had been destroyed before, although in earlier stages. Destroyed by Peter Hovenden's doubt, destroyed by Annie's—this woman Owen loved—not understanding his work, the audacity and beauty of his endeavor.” A hand raised. “Yes, Lisa?”

“But this time it's different. Before he hadn't done it. Hadn't built it.” The metallic screech of a bluejay's call outside the window echoed in the room as if offering itself as a clue. “Now it seems his life's work is worthless. He's a . . .” she hesitated to say it, “a failure.”

“How can you say that?” Ishmael said, turning on her, as if he was the one who had been insulted. “He's not a failure. He's an artist. He's the artist of the beautiful, and it doesn't matter that the butterfly was destroyed. It's better. It should have been destroyed.”

Lisa looked shocked but didn't retreat. “Why? You think there's something noble in destruction. But there's
not. You think destruction is creative, some writing class nonsense. You think you're being an idealist, an artist yourself, but really you're just speaking out of fear—that nothing beautiful can last.”

“Nothing beautiful does last.” Ishmael pronounced it like a verdict. “What's beautiful isn't beautiful because it exists, because it can fill the hand. It's not beautiful because it can be seen or held. It's beautiful in some other way. Its beauty means something else, something better. It's just an object—”

“But that object was his life's work. The object was a work of art,” a student from the back of the room spoke up. “Everything he'd learned and taught himself for his whole life was in that butterfly. The baby destroying it—it's like the baby crushed Owen in his hand, too.”

I kept rolling the pearl between fingers, looking down at it. “Then why wasn't Owen upset? The butterfly acted as if it wanted to fly back to the hand, and so to the safety, of the man who made it. But Owen refuses it, forces it to fly back to the child. Why?”

Ishmael spoke immediately. “Because it's no longer his.”

“Why?”

“Because what you make doesn't belong to you. Not if you're an artist. Because art is always a gift. It's always given. It's not a selfish work. It's—,” and here he paused, as if overcome with emotion, “always an act of love.”

Lisa spoke, catching the glimmer of the thought. “And the child, the baby—it's also an act of love. I mean,
the baby comes out of love, the act of love.” She blushed deeply red as if she had just spoken obscenely.

“So the child and the butterfly are the same, or similar—” I said.

“—and different,” Ishmael added in a hushed voice. “The child's not a work of art. He's a work of the body. The butterfly is a work of art.”

“But Owen must build it. It does exist materially,” I said. “It is an object. If it weren't a body, even if a mechanical body, it couldn't be destroyed.” I closed my hand around the pearl. “But it feels to me that you're both right. The baby and Owen's butterfly are the same and different, a one and a many. Form is the beginning of mortality. Annie herself says that the infant seems to ‘know more of the mystery than we do.'” It as if the child and the butterfly have both come into the world from some shared place, some fecund nothingness or creative chaos that doesn't exactly exist but makes existence possible. Some people call it soul, or spirit, or pneuma—some call it breath. The butterfly is powered by perpetual motion, this was Owen's great discovery that Peter Hovenden so skeptically dismissed—the perpetual motion. Its artistry is that Owen had found a way to fuse soul to matter, to animate gold and gears and even dust into a harmony of impossible flight. The child, too, is the same impossibility. The heart beats and it's not simply an electrical pulse, it's not only the nerves. The child is closer to the mystery the butterfly is manifest proof of—that something is pulled from some other
region, some other realm or world, Eros and Chaos, Memory and Power, Mother and Father, formlessness and form, something no word does justice to, something a word in trying to name dispels, this mystery in life that life can be.” I opened my hand and looked at the pearl. I held it up in front of my eye, pinched between thumb and finger. “Sometimes I wonder how much of what is real is a choice we make. We make this choice every day, every minute—maybe we are right now choosing if this instant is real, this conversation. For some of you it will be, and for others of you, it will simply be something less than experience, an hour time moved through with you as its distracted witness.” I pinched the pearl harder; I could feel its surface pressing into my skin. “For Annie, that reality is the body, the body of her child, that body made in love and pleasure with her husband, the body that feeds off her body, which suckles life from her breast.” I pinched the pearl so hard it shot from my fingers, hit the ground with a small and hollow knock and rolled down the aisle in a straight line—it sounded like a pencil drawing a line on a page—toward Ishmael, who bent down, cupped his hand over it, and picked it up. “And the butterfly takes life from somewhere else. Maybe Owen's soul. Maybe the soul that if it is eternal is also infinite and so exists, if it exists, not within us but outside us . . . maybe art is that creation which puts on form as a soul puts on a body, but doesn't privilege the body, doesn't revel in the form, but waits again to be released to be realized, for what is real, what is chosen as
what is real, isn't the gold flakes, isn't the gold gears, isn't the golden glow of those handmade wings. What's real is the force that through the wings makes the butterfly fly. It is just as real when the butterfly is destroyed. Maybe it's more real then. It's just as real when the body is dead.”