Reaction I:

Toni Morrison’s description of New York City in Jazz:

Daylight slants like a razor, cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this makes me dream tall and feel in on things.

Sometimes a work of art you’ve carried around with you for a while starts to feel as if it’s ceded all its secrets to you: I’ve used that Morrison quote in a number of classes and workshops, stared at it on days when I need a reminder of all that is possible with language, listened (with that sense of envy) to a fellow writer describe how it felt on his first visit to New York City to realize that he was looking at the scenes Morrison describes in those sentences. I’ve talked about the comma in the second to last sentence for longer than I can talk about most paragraphs. And along the way, the sentences lost their freshness to me – so dissected, so examined, I had to squint hard to see them for the beauty of what they accomplished rather than for the brilliance with which they were composed.

And then I clicked on Stargazer in the SALIDAA archive, and Toni Morrison’s sentences became fresh once more, whittled in wood. I wanted to move the sculpture in the photograph just a little bit towards the window which cast the patch of sunlight on the floor so that I could truly see daylight slant like a razor. In my imagination, I did. The benefits of a digital image: you allow your imagination to manipulate it, unhindered by the actual weight of the thing or the hands-off etiquette of observing art.

In the top half I see looking faces...which are people, which the work of stonemasons? Change stonemason to woodmason (pretend that word exists; wonder why it doesn’t). Which are people, which the work of stonemason? Is the Stargazer real or artifice? Does the one exclude the other?

Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. How is lovemaking blasé? How are clarinets blasé? I always ask my students. Sorrow, surely sorrow can’t be blasé? I have my own answer for them, about what it all means – about the nature of cities, the way everything seems possible there and, because everything is possible, nothing is wondrous - but that absence of wondrousness, the absence of believing anything impossible, is itself the wonder of a city. That’s how I’ve interpreted that line in the decade since I first read it. But suddenly I’m looking at the sentence from a dizzying height. I’m looking at the shadow world of buildings, and realize I always assumed those ‘looking faces’ were looking down at the streets below, at the life of the city. Not once, never once, did it occur to me that the faces were looking up.

And how strange that is, because when I’m in that city – New York City – I find myself constantly craning my neck for a sight of the sky. And when I’m asked if I’d ever like to live there, one of my first responses is (and has been for many years), ‘I’d miss the stars.’

And suddenly it becomes obvious that when you look up – when you dream tall – it’s possible for everything to seem blasé in comparison to what the stars suggest. When you look up, consider the stars which you’re seeing or which you know lie beyond a layer of clouds or light pollution, even the most magnificent of cities can fail to impress by contrast.

I look at STARGAZER and I do something I’ve never done in all the years of sifting the syllables of Toni Morrison’s words through my mind: I put myself in the sentences

Reaction II:

I miss my skylight.

It’s been eight years now since I lived there, but when I look at STARGAZER I can’t help thinking I would give up this two-bedroom, two-storey home in Upstate New York (with a garden in which deer come to nibble on the bushes) for the studio flat in Massachusetts in which I lived as a student. The floors sloped (which made my chair-on-wheels roll away from my desk while I was in the middle of typing a sentence), the low roof sloped (how often did I bang my head against it?), the cupboard was dank. But above my bed, there was a skylight. Through it I watched: stars, a lunar eclipse, the Halle-Bop comet, men and women dropping from the sky with brightly coloured parachutes ballooning above them.

I wrote my first novel in that flat – it ends with a boy on his roof, jumping up to touch the stars.

Reaction III:

A simple image will not suffice.

I search for STARGAZER on the internet. I find her. She is 200 cm tall. 200 cm. That’s 6.5 feet tall. Less than a foot separates us. There’s something pleasing about knowing that. Too much taller and she might have become a grotesque – but I have friends 6.5 feet tall; I know what it is to stand beside that height, to feel entirely comfortable there. But I also like the fact that I can look up to her. I didn’t know it until I translated centimetres into inches but I really didn’t want her to be shorter than me.

Reaction IV:

She is made of lime.
I am so much a creature of urban spaces, I only associate the word ‘lime’ with a fruit that can be found in neon-lit supermarkets. So I go in search of the lime tree (electronically, of course). And discover that the tree has no relation to the fruit. Which is fine. I don’t want her made of something that produces sourness. Pleasingly, I discover that the lime tree is often used as a honey plant for bee-keepers and also for making the bodies of electric guitars. Winnie the Pooh! Bob Dylan! Two of my heroes brought together by their association to the Stargazer.

In ancient Germanic mythology the lime-tree was worshipped for its association with the goddess, Freya, and believed to have a protective power. Judicial meetings were often held under the lime tree, as it was believed no one could tell a lie beneath a lime tree without offending Freya. So the lime tree became associated with justice, and well after Christianity brought an end to the worship of Freya German courts used to hand down judgements sub talia (under the lime tree).

Freya’s association with love means the lime tree came to symbolize romance.

All this seems apt.

Reaction V:

I crop her face, and make it the wallpaper on my computer. I can’t decide if she’s enraptured or curious. I zoom in and zoom in, for an instant I glimpse wistfulness, and then she is breaking up into thousands of pixels.

But that glimpse is enough to create doubt. I scour her surface, see a dark spot on her abdomen. A knot in the wood? A wound? A scar of a wound that healed?

The buildings which she rises out of seem constricting now. She is bound by them, struggling to escape.

I return to the internet, find her again – she is Stargazer I, naked, hands clasped over her belly, head thrown back to look at the sky, no buildings around her, her arms covering the dark spot on her abdomen. This is her in freedom, at peace. She is shorter – 148 cm and made of cherry. We are given other dimensions – she is 148x46x41. Why is it that we are only told one measurement, one dimension, for my Stargazer?

I decide they are not the same. Stargazer and Stargazer I are not different representations of the same creature. Mine is lime and towers above me. The other is cherry and less than 5 feet tall.

I examine mine again. She is not bound in, and if she is she shows us what dreaming can do to free us.

She is better than the cherry creature. I feel this strongly.

Reaction VI:

I cannot believe I talked, in Reaction I, about the benefit of a digital image. She is not pixels, she is wood. I want to know what it is to run my hands along her, to investigate up close the mark on her abdomen, to stand on a stack of books about constellations and examine her expression more closely. I want her to show me what is secretive in her nature and what is merely obscured in the process of digitalizing her. I want her in three dimensions.

Reaction VII:

I imagine moving into a flat, a house, an attic-room, with a skylight. I imagine seeking her out, and taking her home. Briefly, I wonder how much she costs and that thought makes me uncomfortable.

A skylight should have an arm-chair or a bed beneath it, to encourage skygazing. But if she moves in with me, I’ll place her under the skylight and give up my own view of the stars.

Reaction VIII:

No, I won’t.

Reaction IX:

She wouldn’t want me to, anyway.

Reaction X:

I can’t be sure of that.

Reaction XI:

I imagine her beneath a skylight. That I can do for her. I imagine her beneath a skylight in a city, vast and filled with dreams, clear nights above: eclipses, comets, shooting stars, meteor showers, aurora borealis, constellations shaped like dragons.

The enigma that is her smile quirks in my direction.

Even then, her eyes are gazing up, up...

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