Copyright 2006 by Teri Micco

SYNCHRONICITY
& Transcending the Art School Blues

Creative nonfiction
by Teri Micco

                    1988 — New York City
The night sky here is eerie red and starless. The rain falls, and the snow, onto hard black ground made by men—ground that never thirsts, ground where only potholes grow. On rare nights in Manhattan when the sky is clear and I stop to watch the full moon rising, people passing stop to stare at me, wondering, "What are you looking at?" "The moon," I say, but they are gone already—past. There is no time for such things in this city place, for picking out Orion's belt or watching white clouds in a black sky racing by. But if you have been here, you know.

I rode the train all the way from Denver to Grand Central Station to get here. I didn't want to fly. I wanted to feel the miles ticking by, hear them telling more than distance, more than time. I was born just before the sun was, in Mercy Hospital nestled underneath an open prairie sky in the state of Kansas, but I grew up in the rolling foothills outside of Denver.

I am only here for my master's degree. I am only here for art school—to paint—to find my voice, or release it, anyway, from whatever skin it's been waiting around in for so long. Because, finally, six years after college, while in the midst of my "real jobs" of choice—graphic design and illustration—I began to acknowledge a feeling I'd been suppressing for years: a nagging distance, an ever-present gap, between what my paintings and drawings looked like, and who I was inside. Not that they weren't competent, beautiful, even powerful. They were. Not that I hadn't delved deeply, passionately, lyrically into each subject. I had. I had made discoveries, told complex stories, even revealed truths. Yet to me they somehow still felt like cartoons. It was as if all the technical knowledge I had gained through years of dedicated practice had somehow become a prison. A place where Heart, by some unspoken necessity, took a backseat to Mind.

I began to realize that even though I thought I had been clinging fiercely to my own vision from the time I was very small and for all those years after, what I had really been doing was filtering and taming the internal workings of my heart and soul, and spooning them neatly (safely) into a form rigid enough to be "acceptable" to my Mind's eye. To my Family's eye. To Society's eye. I could have been the poster child for the Puritan Work Ethic: happily working long, unforgiving hours, pushing my body beyond reason, relentlessly seeking Perfection with a capital P. Yet never quite with abandon. Never really letting my heart go where my mind was afraid to tread.

So when I picked up that Communication Arts magazine and it fell open to the page saying, come to New York, "create personal statements in pictures and words," what else could I do but answer? My own words. My own images. Freedom. Finally. Time. Finally. Plus, Marshall Arisman, the head (heart, really) of the program, was one of my all-time favorite illustrators. Even though his work was profoundly dark, there was something beyond darkness in it. It touched some aching place inside me somehow without abandoning me there. Still, I didn't really figure on getting in. And even if I did get in, where would the money come from? And what about all that humidity and concrete wearing away at those messed-up legs of mine that had to struggle to keep me vertical even in the best of circumstances? And never mind how my Mom would react: "NEW YORK CITY!?!" With her childhood memories, I'd be lucky if the world didn't flat out end when I told her. Minor details. Right?

But here I am.

Sooner or later in the first semester they sent us into Chinatown for two days and told us to find something to paint. Anything "Oriental" would do.

But I was lost. I didn't know these people. What could I paint except their surfaces? Was the peach-shaped pot I would soon hold in my hand a trinket, or a spherical filter for the water of a long life? I was afraid that if I painted people without knowing them, or took their pictures, I would be treating them like objects in a still-life. Like curios, like animals in a zoo. Our teacher believed that if we captured the surface of something by looking carefully, surgically, and then put it down in a beautiful way, we would somehow be telling the truth about it. The first assignment and I was in hot water already. The masks we wear, the colors we don like chameleons to protect ourselves from the dangers of this world do not often mirror the pulse that beats its song into flesh and bone. Just as the soft flesh of a peach does not speak the stone, nor the stone its soft womb whisper.

Still, I knew what was expected. After all, I had seen Sean's sketch books one wet and heavy city day. The school's prodigal son had returned. And I had huddled around him with the rest of the class, wondering at the haggard starkness of his lines, at the brutal delicacy of his touch. I had stood there shattered by these lines pressed with bony intensity out of fingers too busy—too greedy for harsh reality—to even wonder why, let alone who. Virtuoso lines blessed with conviction. Relentless lines seeking and capturing the intricate contours of one suffocating truth after another: a hustler here, a victim of AIDS there, some gay men with sad eyes in a bath house down the street, another hustler, some regulars wandering through the ER at Bellevue, a child on life support from the front, a child on life support from this side, from the other side, this side, the other side, this side. Why? In the name of Reality? What could these lines that knew only the lonely moment they traced tell me, really? Who was trapped there on those dirty street corners and unforgiving benches? Lost in the sterile confines of those halls? Abandoned in the endless tangle of tubes and wires leading to that borrowed hospital bed?

Why didn't it matter?

As a few of us rattled along in the subway, more than six feet under ground and some days later, bound for a place called Chinatown, armed with our sketch books and drawing tools, I could only wonder, What am I going to draw? Whose unsuspecting soul am I supposed to strand forever in a single arbitrary moment? Without history. Without identity. Without a choice. What am I doing here? Because I knew better. I knew enough about hospital beds and how too much despair could sometimes wrench away my "who" from my "physically there." I knew how sometimes all the hope and will and love I had was tucked away so deep inside it couldn't shine its way out of a paper bag, let alone all the way out into The Real World.

"What's the big deal? It's only a few drawings," the Voice of Reason and most of my classmates were saying.

Maybe.

Never mind that article in the Times, either—the one that just happened to show up under my nose in the nick of time, I guess, to amplify all my reservations. The testy one about how the people of Chinatown didn't want their pictures taken anymore, how this was their life they were trying to live, not some spectacle engineered to entertain a bunch of tourists.

But I hadn't told anyone, not even my friends, what was mostly eating at me. Seven years at least gone by and still too tender. Because, mostly, I was thinking of my friend John and the three-by-five lined recipe card his mom had shared with those of us who'd journeyed to his favorite place in the world one cold newborn Spring afternoon. John's the one who took my breath away and slid the sky underneath my feet. When we met, I was so shut down from years of stuffing pain and holding onto sorrow that the Love I suddenly felt frightened and even sometimes threatened to spontaneously combust me. It was too big for my little body, for one thing, or any container for that matter. Plus, it had no use for the cynical humor I'd been wearing as armor against all the ways my life wasn't what I'd hoped it would be since I'd hurt my knee and the bones had begun to crumble. The light in John's eyes spoke to the me I had hidden away—to the battered but unbroken spirit-girl in me who still smiled knowingly at black clouds filled with white rain, and listened secretly to the stars. "Talk to the trees," he'd written when I was more than miles away. "They know. They understand."

Days or maybe moments before he left the planet, weak from cancer and chemo, his body disintegrating unceremoniously in a hospital bed, he'd asked his mom for his colored pencils. So when she passed that card around for each of us to hold however many days later, there were his playful, penetrating eyes again, his lost but not forgotten beard, his quiet, stormy face still alive with longing, swirling gently, intensely out of white, made up of every unlikely color under the sun. Defying gravity. Holding form here and relinquishing it there. Not uninformed by the circumstances he was in just then, but somehow not trapped by them either. Fearless. Saying not what any mirror could have told him about himself, but saying what was True.

Still, about as raw as I could be, after climbing out of the stinking dankness of the subway tunnels on day two of our expedition, and standing quietly for a second or two in the sunlight, blinking, with people swirling everywhere around us, I had to admit I felt alive there in Chinatown—somehow connected. And the moon was full and roaming low in the sky that morning, the sixth day of October, so something had to happen. The Cosmos had to save me. Right?

I paced the streets listening with my eyes, my camera dangling limply at my side, thinking: "If I don't find something I can draw today, I'm gonna flunk. That's all. I'm just gonna flunk." Past Mott Street, then Canal. "I'm gonna flunk." Past a Carvel Cake Shop.

Then I felt something. Heard something. A flurry of wings? I stopped, jutting out of the crowded street like a tree limb snagged on a river rock. My two friends, Renée and Flip, kept walking, swept along in the unheeding floodtide of people flowing upstreet. "Wait," I said as loudly as I dared. And no one heard. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered right then more than the crushing sense of urgency pulling me across the threshold and into that Carvel Cake Shop. On the floor in the center of the shop, inside a hastily overturned wire milk crate, was a falcon. A Peregrine penned and out of place. She had flown in out of the blue. Confused or answering some ancient call, I didn't know which. I bent low to look into her eyes and they were sad and proud and screaming.

I wanted to run away.

Her wings groped backwards and sideways, feeling for the air they could no longer hold. Captivity was her Now, and Now her Eternity. I said something soft. I wanted to tell her what I had been trying to tell myself about this city: that it was only a man-made contraption that held her. That her sky would be made of blue again and not this industrial fluorescent tile. I wanted to say, "It isn't what it seems. Your soul is of the air and even caged can never lose its flight." Instead I think I asked her if I could take her picture. The ASPCA was coming to take her away. That's what the young Chinese man who kept the cakes and scooped the ice cream said, carelessly kicking at the falcon's makeshift cage. Somehow I could not say goodbye. We were a single pair of eyes looking into each other.

And then I left.

And when I came back an hour or so later, the falcon was gone.

Standing there a little lost, everything back to business as usual, I felt the touch of a hundred pairs of watching, waiting eyes. Time fluttered gently, inconspicuously, to a halt. On the wall overlooking the place where once the falcon had stood, I suddenly saw what I had missed before: a huge Chinese straw painting of every kind of bird sitting and standing, flying and swimming two by two by two, free, under a round red sun. In the center was a silky, stately bird standing maybe two feet tall and looking intently out. A Korean friend translated the four characters that ran in black down one side: One hundred year old, bird, morning, wind.

A few days passed and still I couldn't forget the falcon's questioning eyes. "If only I could see what she had seen," I mused to my friend Ed. "Why don't you just get in a helicopter, then?" Naturally.

So I took to the air.

Before leaving home my Mom, in her wisdom, had equipped me with a Triple-A coupon book, just in case. Now, smiling and holding tightly to the perfect coupon for the occasion, I headed for the East River and bought a ticket on a sight-seeing helicopter that just happened to fly every fifteen minutes at falcon height west over Central Park, south around the Statue of Liberty, northeast past the World Trade Center and finally over Chinatown.

I had never been in a helicopter before. Too afraid of heights.

As we lifted gently rocking into the sky, I felt an unexpected surge of joy pounding through me like the pounding whir of the metal blades keeping us in air. I was out of it. Out of its bigness. Out of its bleating horns and neon, out of its gleaming windowed walls rising and rising out of concrete streets blotting out sky and sun, out of its breathless beating rush of feet and hands and heads hurrying to any someplace now. I could see the dome of the sky and trace the circle where it meets the land with my eyes. I could see the city, disconnected from nature, even oblivious to it, raging on without me. And all the pressing modern concerns—the daily compromises of space, of time spent paying dues and cutting corners and getting ahead—all the ugly means of chasing some elusive and material dream humming there below me, compressed onto one tiny island called Manhattan, somehow seeking justification.

Flying over Central Park, I saw how the trees clung together like multi-colored porous spheres—red and green and yellow-gold—and how the low-slung buildings of Chinatown, unlike their sky-scraping neighbors, squatted and clumped together like vibrantly colored cubes, mirroring the trees. I looked until I was free—until the parallels between landscape and humanscape had become suddenly, ineffably apparent. Two worlds unutterably different and looking alike, as they must have looked to a falcon flying overhead one October day ago.

Back on earth, I asked my friends if they thought anyone would believe me if I were to paint what I had just lived. They figured, "Probably not." And they probably figured right.

Still, at least I didn't flunk.

Postscript: According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Peregrine falcons disappeared as a nesting species from New York State sometime in the early 1960s, mostly as a result of pesticide residues in their prey. It wasn't until 1983 that peregrines returned to the state, making their first nests on two bridges in New York City (http://www.dec.state.ny.us/website/dfwmr/wildlife/endspec/peregrine.html). Although peregrine falcons were removed from the federal list of endangered species in 1999, as of January 2005, they were still listed as an endangered species in New York State. ~ from "Peregrine Falcons," New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Endangered Species Program. 15 Jan., 2005 (http://www.fws.gov/endangered/recovery/peregrine/).

Words and illustrations copyright 2006 by Teri Micco