Dance at the Edge
Emma got her tears under control. She began to feel angry at being so grievously misunderstood. She said, “Sanctus Geloso, you don’t understand! I was drawing an image that evokes something of how I feel about Viola Knight. I wasn’t trying to represent her.”
“Just your feelings for her?” Sanctus said—looking and sounding scathingly skeptical. “Trying to pin down what it is that so excites you about her, is that it?”
“No!” Emma said. “That’s not it! It’s more like an evocation. Only I’m not an artist, so I can’t do it with any sophistication!”
“No ethical artist would ever evoke a person by drawing a part of their body,” Sanctus said severely. “Any more than an actor would pretend to be representing a human being. Think about it, Emma. The map isn’t the object it denotes. With nonhuman objects, that’s pretty easy to remember, and when one confuses the map with a nonhuman object, one generally makes a fool of oneself. With persons, though, it’s the other way around. When one maps a human, he or she almost instantly conforms to the map, for it becomes what you and others notice about that person. Which is why most people in the world have long since concluded that drawing a map of someone is disrespectful.”
Emma thought ruefully of the subtleties of the play she had seen and the group’s discussion of it. It had been all evocation, which was trickier in drama than in fiction or sculpture or painting, precisely because of the difficulty of making sense while avoiding mapping personalities. The actor’s and dramatist’s arts were the trickiest. The entire group agreed about that. Emma said, “I suppose you’re right, Sanctus. But I’m so… obsessed. I keep seeing her hand in my mind. And so my fingers just keep wanting to draw it. As though it’s imprinted on my brain.”
Sanctus pursed his full, shapely lips. “Sexual love is so uncivilized,” he said. “We never see the object of our love except in really skewed, perverse ways. I suppose one could say that falling in love is like inscribing a map on one’s vision. There’s just the map, and everything that isn’t on it is meaningless.” Sanctus sighed. “Have a care for what you’re doing, Emma. If you start one little bit of human mapping, before you know it you’ll be mapping everything, in your mind if not actually on-screen.” He tugged his boyishly purple and flame sleeve down over his lanky, ungainly wrist and gave her a knowing look. “It really is a slippery slope. And at the bottom lies not only alienation from civilization, but insanity.”
Emma pictured herself on a steep, treeless hill slicked with mud and oil, struggling to keep her footing.
Sanctus said, “Wouldn’t it be more honest to get her out of your system with an affair, rather than simply obsessing about her all the time?”
Emma felt too foolish to do more than mumble a noncommittal reply and beat a hasty retreat. Even if she could map out her feelings, he still wouldn’t understand. That she knew.
7.
Emma’s pleasure-pain became the nausea of confused bad feelings. Walking through campus to town and then to the very outskirts, Emma Persimmon reviewed moment after moment from her past in which she or another child had been castigated for “characterizing” herself or someone else. One does not say that Alan Farnseworth is a tattletale. One says that Alan Farnseworth tattled again to the teacher. There’s a difference, Emma, a big difference. Only certain kinds of generalizations are honest and respectful, namely those that identify a person in terms of guild affiliation, status, age, and village. But a characterization is a generalization pretending to say everything that’s important about a person, when it says only something very partial and is a violation of their integrity. A statement of fact is just that. It’s something that allows others to draw their own conclusions, depending on context and history. Remember how terrible you felt when that little girl in your class said you were “moony”?
But was drawing the hand of one’s beloved the same thing? No, Emma decided, it was not. Her drawings of that hand were signs she made for herself alone, not maps that others could read. And if her drawings mapped anything, they mapped her desire for Viola, not Viola herself. The distinction was crucial! Emma recalled what Montrose Beckoner had had to say about art, maps, and the gaze just the other day. The gaze was the common way of looking at a thing, what some people might call the correct way. If you read the map correctly, you took from it the same information everyone else did. The correct information. If you looked at a piece of architecture with what Montrose called “the aesthetic gaze,” you saw what the architect intended you to see, what any careful, aesthetically acute observer would see. The look was something else. It was private. It wasn’t shared. It was perverse—and maybe profane.
And the look usually focused on signs, rather than on maps. Who but Emma Persimmon could know what that wrist bone and out-of-proportion third knuckle were supposed to mean?
Emma rushed back to campus, ecstatic. Sanctus Geloso had been wrong to chastise her for dissing the woman of her dreams. He had mistaken her look for the gaze. He had mistaken her desire for an object desired. He’d been, in short, presumptuous: which made it all his problem, not hers.
