Her face was plain, and she did nothing to enhance it. She kept her straight brown hair long, down to the middle of her back, and in winter, when she wore her black fur cap with the earmuffs tied under her chin, and her oversize black coat, with her computer bag slung over her shoulder, she looked more like a smudge moving across the landscape than a person.
She was an artist and had little patience for other folk, though she was not irascible. She just didn’t participate in the everyday social world. Aloof was not an appropriate term to describe her socially. Nor was distant. She was just not there, or here, if one was near her. Speak to her and she would respond. She was not rude. But she seldom went further than that.
As an artist, she drew from her imagination, never from the world. Her drawings and paintings were of fantasy creatures—women, for example, with long white hair, thin bodies, and liquid eyes; and non-humanoid figures, all with distinct personalities, some with human-like sympathies, some utterly non-human. She imagined landscapes, cityscapes, domiciles, clothing, and technologies that we have not yet realized in our own world. She put these works into motion in her stories, poems, and plays. One felt when one spoke with her that she would much rather live in the worlds she created than in the one she did live in. It made one sad.
Her name was Aeris. She was one of my students. She came to me late in my career, and she was strange from the first. Not strange, though, as one would imagine a student being to a professor. No. There was nothing about Aeris that resembled other people. In some ways, she was herself a fantasy figure, someone who stepped out of one of her paintings or stories and tried to make a go of it in this realm, most unsuccessfully. Poor Aeris. Though I should neither say that nor think it, for in her own mind she was perfectly content, happy even. She was who she was, and she did what she did. Success? That was a concept we measured our lives by. It meant nothing to her.
This story about Aeris begins on the day she came to me to supervise an independent study in advanced composition. She needed to do this to satisfy a requirement for her major. I was eager to work with her, imagining I would get to know something about her way of life, about her thinking, her values and judgments, her aspirations. I looked forward to the time I was to spend with her. She intrigued me. But I had no notion how intriguing she would turn out to be, and I had no notion of where her visit to me that day would take her. Ultimately, I still have no notion of that, though a lot of time has passed since that semester.
* * *
“But Aeris, this is a painting. I mean, I like it, but it has nothing to do with writing.”
She had put her computer on my desk and booted up an image. I almost gasped when I saw it. It was an incredibly finely done nude torso of a woman, her arms raised, and instead of hands and fingers, her arms morphed gradually into tree branches, and her hair was made of leafy vines that trailed down her back and side.
“The original is in my studio at home.”
“Good. I’m glad. I don’t know why you’re showing this to me, though.”
“My assignment was to design a research project, wasn’t it? Something in the area of my major?”
“Yes,” I said, an interrogative note of incredulity in my voice.
“She’s my project. I’m going to do my semester’s research on her.”
“OK. Who is she? Not Daphne? It’s not her, I take it.”
I had dismissed the obvious allusion to the story of Apollo and Daphne, knowing that Aeris was incapable of being obvious about anything.
“No, she’s not Daphne. I wouldn’t need to do a project on her. Everybody already knows Daphne.”
“So,” I said, “who is she?”
“That’s the point. I don’t know. That’s what I want to spend my semester writing about. Who she is.
“And you can research this topic?”
“What do you mean by research?”
“I mean what we mean by research. You will scour the literature on this figure, let it lead you to wherever it goes, and write up the results.”
“But there is no literature on this figure.”
Exactly, I wanted to say, again, suppressing my first inclinations and giving her enough leeway to at least keep on thinking out loud.
“I don’t understand what you are thinking, Aeris. What are you intending?”
“This figure means something. I don’t know what yet. That’s what I want to spend the semester finding out.”
“How do you expect to do that?”
She paused a moment, her eyes fixed on a place in the air above my head. I sat quietly looking at her, wondering if this idea of working with her was going to work out.
“By exploring, by studying, the vision that produced her. How else? She means something. I need to know what. That’s why I want to take this course.”
I let her go after half an hour of talking about this vision. Or I should say I told her to go. She was quite patient with me, though, and left feeling like she had made some headway. Her art professor, she told me, simply threw her out of his office. She really needed me to work with her on this. In the end I agreed. She was more than I bargained for. Oh, much more.
For one thing, the “vision” from which her figure emerged came from her own head. It was this “vision” she wanted to research. It existed, I told her, only in her memory. No, she replied patiently, it existed in the finished painting itself. Pointing to the image on her laptop, she reminded me that it was in her studio, and she told me its dimensions. The original was quite large, measuring 28 inches in width by 38 in height. She pointed to some features of the painting I would not have noticed unless I had been studying it. These were background and foreground objects and meant nothing to my eye at all except as fill for the empty spaces of the canvas. The torso dominated the image, pulled the eye into its features so strongly that these objects merely appeared as incidentals. But to her, they were mysterious. When she left, I had every expectation that her semester’s work would be at the very least interesting, though it may not conform to anything I might imagine as research.
* * *
I had explained the semester’s work, what I expected from her in terms of finished writing, and the due dates for each part. She agreed, saying that this was exactly what she had hoped when she came to me. She left my office, but at the door she said, “I’ll have the first part done long before the due date. I’ll have the whole project done before the end of the semester. Is that all right?”
“OK,” I said. “I look forward to it.”
I expected she would write furiously and have something to show me in a few weeks. But I could not have anticipated the pace of her “researches.” It took her only three days to get the first part in. It was supposed to be a first draft. But it was a finished piece of writing that needed no revising, no editing even. I present a small portion of it here untouched:
When an artist begins a new canvas, she necessarily drafts, either in her mind’s eye or in pencil lightly on the canvas itself, the main focus, the object, of her work, and then proceeds to build up around it the context within which the object of her interest must appear. She builds her perspectives, she shapes the locale, indoors or out, determines the lighting, the coloring, the overall design of what will be the finished picture, all after her primary object has been defined, all for the purpose of setting that object off for the viewer’s attention. . . .
This is the way the artist normally works. This is not how Forest Woman came to me. I do not have a title for this painting. I call its central image Forest Woman because I do not know who or what she is yet. The name is tentative and most likely will change as I learn more about her.
But look now at exhibit 1, the large 8X10 photo of the painting provided in Appendix A. Look to the left side of the canvas, at the horizon line. You will see three objects arranged so that two are together near the left edge of the canvas and one is separated from the others and lies very near the right arm of Forest Woman exactly at the junction where her arm begins to metamorphose into branch. Now, look at exhibit 2, the close-ups of these objects. Notice how strangely colored they are. They are gray with lighter and darker blends mixed into them. Across their tops beginning about midway up is the color of burnt umber, and a light layer of raw sienna tops all three, casting a sunset glow upon them. I call the reader’s attention to these “background” objects because as the vision unfolded that led to Forest Woman, these objects came first to the canvas, before there was a horizon line, and before Forest Woman herself intruded into my imagination. These objects are, therefore, implicated in the generation of this painting. They deserve scrutiny. . . .
The first thing to notice about them is that they are three. The second is that they are not identical. Each one is in small ways different from the others. The third thing to notice about them is that they were set exactly where the horizon line would have to be in relation to the main figure, Forest Woman, which presupposes that their placement anticipated what then, at the time, did not exist. They are, then, truly generative, which makes the question as to what they are of first importance. We must now look more closely at them.
* * *
I am most definitely attracted to this writing. At this point, some fifteen pages in, Aeris has created a compelling mystery, and as the reader addressed in the writing I am certainly hooked and curiously attracted. I want to know what she has to say about these curious objects. To me they look merely like blobs of paint, taking no definite shape, or at least, no identifiable shape.
* * *
We notice that the evening sunlight that shines upon them comes from the right side of the canvas, which means that Forest Woman is facing north as she gazes out of her two-dimensional plane. And that means that the viewer gazing at her is facing south from her perspective. The importance of this we cannot as yet know. It will no doubt become clear as we learn more. . . .
Focusing now on the object furthest to the left edge of the canvas, turn to exhibit 3, the close-up of that object. We see that it is an irregular ovoid, its shape toward the larger side being dented and uneven, and the shape toward the narrow side widening with a bulge. This shape is very strange, first because it seems to violate the geometry of the object, but also, secondly, because, as one more and more closely scrutinizes it, it looks like something within is struggling to break out of it. What can that be? We cannot know. But look—it is happening. Something is breaking out of that object!
* * *
Incredible! I scrutinized the object with a magnifying glass, and all that she says about it is true. I would like to have the actual canvas here, in my office, so I can examine it as she discusses it, all the better to confirm her observations. I don’t know if she will bring it to me, though. I must ask. In the meantime, she continues in this first writing:
* * *
Whatever that something is, it is a birth, and that means ultimately that Forest Woman is its mother, which means, also, that Forest Woman is not a virgin, not pure in the sense that ancient myth represents purity in the virginity of Artemis, Mary, and, of course, Daphne, who, to preserve her purity, fled from the embraces of the divine Apollo and, crying out in extremis for assistance from the Gods as she is being caught and pawed by Him, is turned into a laurel tree. . . . Scrutiny of the other two objects shows that they too are ovoid in shape, but quite regular, which means they are either later in time from the first or unfertilized. We cannot know which. We can, however, surmise that the one with the life inside it is the one we must tend to for the purposes of interpreting the meaning of the painting as a whole. . . .
To summarize: the three objects on the left horizon line were the first objects placed on the canvas. They are the key to understanding the finished painting. They seemed to have been strategically placed to call forth what would be the painting’s main figure. The ovoid object furthest to the left side of the canvas contains a life struggling to free itself. The other two objects are also ovoid but seemingly not filled with life.
* * *
This ends the first writing. I was more than pleased with both the textual precision of Aeris’ prose and the thrust of her thesis. She aroused my interest, and I must admit I anticipated with a certain relish her next installment. I was not disappointed. She was intent on discovering the import of Forest Woman not only to her work but also to herself personally. She was convinced she could read her subconscious motivations in the finished painting, and more, she was convinced the painting was a deliberate communication from her subconscious to her conscious mind. I knew from both the things she said in conversation as well as the things she wrote that she believed the subconscious mind is a separate psychic entity which we all share but which only the artist has access to. She regarded herself as the artist in that sense.
* * *
The artist is never an isolated, single individual. She is always a collective, at once immersed in a cosmos the non-artist is never aware of, and also born into the village of her moment in time, where she goes to school, finds a job, pays her taxes, maybe marries and has children or maybe not. . . . But that part of her that is immersed in the cosmos sees patterns, glimpses images, senses meanings that the non-artist by nature never does or can, and she shares her glimpses of these patterns, meanings, symbols with her artistic community and also with her village. . . .
Is the human world really dissociated like this? Is it, in essence, neurotic? If it is, this is not a bad thing, not a sickness. This dissociation, perhaps, is the means by which people, those in the village, find meaning and purpose in
life. . . . It is from this dissociation that she, the artist, derives the essential myths that fulfill her in life, and in the end, reconcile her to leaving it. . . .
Let us return now to the painting of Forest Woman. We see, as we have described, the three ovoids on the left side of Forest Woman. . . . Forest Woman herself occupies the center of the canvas and dominates the whole. Her arms are raised, and above the elbows her flesh begins to metamorphose into bark, and her fingers have become branches. Her breasts are firm, and her torso takes the downward glance of the eye to the top of her delta, which rests on the bottom edge of the canvas, and thus we see only the upper round of her hips. Her hair has metamorphosed into leafy vines which trail down her back and left side. Her face is clear and strong, her eyes vivid, her lips just parting as though she were about to speak. Her cheeks reflect the setting sun, but palely, not as though rouge had been applied. Above her head we see no sky, only the darkness of leaf cover in branches which seem to shelter her. On the right side of the canvas, which would be to Forest Woman’s left, we see two things, one not clearly discernible, appearing to be perhaps the north side of a tree trunk up close and dark, almost black, and occupying the edge of the canvas. Next to it, towards the bottom of the canvas, there appear two objects arranged so that they make a V, but a strange sort of V in which the two arms don’t actually come together at the vortex, but are separated. This object, or these objects, if we consider the two arms separately, are intensely interesting to me. They resonate with meaning. But most importantly, these objects were placed in the lower right side of the canvas after the ovoids were placed on the left side. Thus these objects and the ovoids together define the space Forest Woman is about to occupy. Once again, they resonate with deeper vibrations. They call upon me with especial intensity. We must discuss these objects next and let our investigation of them take us where it may.
The first thing to note is that they are two. Two—what possible meaning could “two” have? Two, as in twins. . . . Think of the duality I have described. The dissociation! The one aspect of mundane reality, the other of the numinous vision! The village and the cosmos. People and artists! Think of all the dualities we live among—hot and cold, wet and dry, night and day, the here and the hereafter, god and man, man and woman, the sacred and the profane. The two are twins, the flesh and the spirit. Life and death. . . . They come from the same womb.
We begin to feel something of what may be bursting out of that “egg” on the other side of the canvas, what is trying to be born. . . .
I can’t help but to feel, as I contemplate the canvas, that what we detected breaking out of the ovoid on the other side of the canvas is fearful. Something frightening. Menacing, even. Perhaps it is, even, the “horror” we dare not let ourselves become aware of, which we must keep repressed in order to live our lives normally, as people of the village. The Artist can and often does penetrate to this menace and leaves behind, in the very Heart of Darkness, the traces of her visit. We hear it in Stravinsky’s “The Rites of Spring,” that horror, glimpse it in the Inferno, we encounter it in Edvard Monk’s painting “The Scream,” we symbolize it in the image of the dragon. . . . We flee from it and cover our eyes. . . . This is why it comes to us disguised at first.
Look now at that dark, barely discernible thing, that column of shadow on the extreme right edge of the canvas. Is it nearly black? Almost black? It is the shadow. The darkness. It occupies the cardinal position we call The West. Thus the significance of Forest Woman facing north. This darkness casts
a gloom over the viewer’s vision as she tries to focus on Forest Woman. Perhaps now we begin to understand her.
* * *
“What, What?” I thought to myself when I read those last words. “I don’t understand at all!” This is not the place to end these pages, I fumed. I was irritated and frustrated.
When Aeris left these last pages with me, she had a certain denseness of expression I couldn’t fathom the meaning of. She was usually communicative, if not voluble, but when she came to my desk, she merely handed me the pages and stood beside the desk for a long time, several moments. I looked up at her after I had taken them, expecting her to say something, but seeing her expression, I myself fell silent and waited for her to take the initiative. But after those tense moments passed, she merely turned and walked away. I was quite surprised by this behavior. Looking at the pages I had placed on the desk in front of me, I picked up the bunch of them and commenced reading. At first, they left me in a sort of gloomy mood, after my irritation wore off; but as time passed, that mood changed from gloomy to downright dismal. I couldn’t get the darkness her pages ended with out of my imagination, a darkness tinged with a sense of menace. I began to worry about her.
At first, I did nothing. I awaited her next scheduled visit to my office. But when that day and hour arrived and there was no sign of Aeris, I began to worry. She had not missed an appointment since her first visit to me. I made inquiries. I asked the registrar what other classes she was taking and inquired of her other professors. As I thought, they had not seen her at all during the last several weeks. My next step, of course, was to find out where she lived.
Her studio was a converted garage behind a home just off the edge of campus. It was made of brick painted pink with white trim and had a Dutch roof with a weather vane at its center. Its large eaves overhung the windows and kept them in shade, which explained the small wooden chair and easel beside the door on the far side of the building. Expecting her to be inside, I walked up the drive, crossed over the lawn to the back door, looked at the chair and easel, then peered through the glass panes on the door into what appeared to be a tiny kitchen. Of course, no one was visible, so I knocked. No one came to the door, so I tried the knob, and the door opened. I called in. No answer. I entered and waited a moment in the dimness for my eyes to adjust. Then I crossed the kitchenette to a door that opened onto what I expected to be a combination of bedroom and studio, but it was only a studio.
That room contained a dozen paintings stacked on the floor leaning against the walls here and there, a desk which apparently had held a laptop which was now gone, and which had pages of printed material scattered on it. There was an old stuffed chair in the far corner diagonal to the door. No light came directly into the room in spite of the fact that there were no curtains or shades on the windows. The walls were bare. There was no bed, but there were blankets on the floor in the corner. An image of the kind of life Aeris was leading crept into my mind, and a strong sense of pity rose up in me. I looked at the pages on the desk and tried to read what she had been writing. These pages concerned me more than anything else. They were not finished and looked as though they were printed and rejected as she made progress on her “research.” The page that most concerned me read:
We do not realize how much we are controlled by our instincts. What we fear most we push down into the bottoms of our minds. But then we dream. And these fears return. It’s always worse when the dream comes to us, forces itself upon us, when we are awake. The dream then becomes our reality.
This page was not finished. It held only these few sentences. I could see Aeris frustratingly throw the page aside. It was not what she wanted to say. I feared that what she wanted to say was even more frightening than the idea that waking dreams could take possession of our lives.
On another page she had written,
Our lives are dominated by machines. We live in a world more and more separated from Nature, in which we are separated from others, and separated from ourselves. Reason tells us we have conquered Nature. And then, Nature speaks to us. How? By what it forces us to see when we do not want to look. And when we exhibit that vision, others, who should know better, think we are mentally disturbed.
And on yet another,
Forest Woman was not imagined. She was painted. She came as a deed, not as a thought.
This page had nothing more on it. After reading it, I felt a sort of nervous chill, and I looked around the room, smelled its mustiness, and thought I had better take a look at those paintings stacked on the floor leaning against the walls. These were of different sizes and filled me with a sort of dread. They were apparently the products of Aeris’ obsession with her Forest Woman painting, for they were variations on the details of that painting, many of them different versions of Forest Woman’s face, most of them, in fact, but there were some also of the ovoids, the “rabbit” ears, the tree trunk, the branches above her, her arms metamorphing—obsessive images. I left the studio and, out again into the sun, breathed with relief. I crossed over the lawn to the back door of the house to which the little Dutch garage belonged, and knocked. After a bit someone opened the door. He was an elderly man, very friendly, and before I had a chance to say anything, he said, “Looking for the gal who lives in the rental?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I’m a professor at the college, and she’s one of my students.”
“Haven’t seen her in a couple weeks. She’s paid up till the end of the month, so I don’t bother with her, but I haven’t seen her coming or going.”
“Thanks,” I said, and he closed the door and went back to doing whatever he had been doing before I disturbed him. But his news was alarming.
I needed now to find out Aeris’ parents’ address. I went back to my office, pulled the phonebook out of its drawer, looked up Aeris’ last name, which was definitely not a common name, and found only one listing. I called the number. It was her home. Her parents haven’t heard from her in months. No, they weren’t concerned. Aeris was an independent type. They often went months on end not hearing from her.
Aeris was Aeris. But something was up with Aeris. I had to conclude that for the moment there was nothing more I could do. But I couldn’t stop thinking of her and of her obsession, and of what that obsession might prompt her to do. I had other students, classes to prepare for, and other duties. I had to put Aeris aside. But she percolated in me, popping up in my head every few moments. I was becoming obsessed—with? What? Aeris herself? With her obsession? With the answers to my own questions about what she was discovering in her researches? Maybe all of these things.
But the end of this story is as unsatisfying as the lack of answers to my questions. At the end of the semester during which I worked with her, I retired. After she left, she never emailed, wrote a letter, telephoned, or dropped by. She was as gone as though she had dropped off a cliff. An inquiry with her parents at the end of the semester yielded nothing as well. At the end of that month when I had visited her studio, her parents had cleaned it out and stored those paintings in their attic. They asked me what they meant, and I could only say that one day Aeris would come asking about them. But I had no real confidence that would happen. As I write this, I have had no word from or about her.
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