“Reality Check”—1986 skyline. People seem so insect-like against these massive eruptions. I wander like a Luddite in a city where every human action seems a feeble ass e r t io n a ga in s t an ove rwhe lm ing anonymity. In Senegal, it seemed that almost every other day I was being asked by villagers to take them back to America, sometimes in jest, but more often in earnest. America was the Emerald City. We had the cornucopia and they wanted some of what tumbled out. On Fashion Avenue there are Senegalese illegal immigrants selling cheap jewelry. They are the clever few who by hook or crook found their way to Manhattan to reap their fortunes. Even though I can speak to them in their language they hold little fascination for me. They look hassled and wary. A lookout is posted to each corner of the avenue to watch for police. In a second, they can have their goods bundled up and fade into the crowd, ready to return when the coast was clear. A window display touts mid-summer sale specials on naugahyde shoes and pastel shirts. Things. An effluvia of things. Once I took it for granted, but now I am having a mild panic attack debating the morality of having more than two pair of shoes. There seems to be enough to go around—the abundance of things is d e l ir io u s ly tem p t ing . Yet, wa lk ing through parts of the city it is evident that the chasm between the rich and the poor has yawned even wider. I am amazed at the number of new cars on the streets, and the number of street people. I see a man picking through the garbage cans eating whatever he can find. A woman with a baby on her lap holds a placard that reads, “ No home. No money. Need change for baby formula and diapers.” There were beggars in Senegal, but they had their role in Muslim society; hence, a kind of dignity. Here, that man and this woman are frauds upon society—to be ignored. On a street corner in the U.S. there is nothing dignified about a can of coins and a baby on the lap. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. .. the unctive air of Great Art. It is here that I his is a novelty from the anarchy of travel in West Africa with its screeching chickens, complaining goats, squalling babies, and rambunctious crowds piling onto shabby Peugeot buses. On this bus I don’t hear a whisper. begin to feel the incipient nauseau of things. I was mugged by the abundance of art. Jordaens, Botticelli, Titian, De Hooch, Hals, Fragonard. From the dun- colored days of the hivemage (where I once counted sixteen shades of brown outside my hut) to the color-riot of Rousseau. Glutted. . . I can no more digest this feast than I could eat 50 slices of cream cheese pie. I sit in a corner of the Impressionist Gallery watching the museum visitors passing their faces absent-mindedly from one masterpiece to another with the ind iffe rence of people eating hors d ’oeuvres. Van Gogh is consumed like a cracker, Renoir like an olive. Sic transit gloria mundi. I feel peevish. People are crashing against the surface of things. It seems that any critical faculties we once had are drowned in a sludge. If we see the thing, we do not see the meaning. Seurat is a picture of dots; Cezanne becomes a guy who painted square apples. It all begins to look the same and we are profoundly unimpressed. I have a vision leaving the Met. I see America tranquilized by things. The transient distractions things brought us will soon pass, leaving us dispirited, a little more anxious and craving. We have become the products of manipulations by people producing things. We receive our guidance from the ersatz authority of money. In the process we substitute the authentic events in our lives for the de- mogoguery of someone else’s thing. We have almost everything at our fingertips. . .including a vast howling emptiness that things could not fill. In my vision I see a world created in our image: n Senegal I was forced to open my eyes. A mirror had been held up to me and I was compelled t o . look at myself in the most unflattering light of the African sun. confusion, noise, violence. At the root of it all we are terribly, terribly afraid. It is not a pretty sight. America seems to be a nation of sleepwalkers. I feel like a man failing into a sleep, lulled to sleeji by the smothering warmth and softness of security. In Senegal I was forced to open my eyes. A mirror had been held up to me and I was compelled to look at myself in the most unflattering light of the African sun. My romantic notions had been scoured away—I was left with my ruins. In their place, a deeper sharper reality, the world as it appears between ideas. These were the eyes I would return with to America. And what does it mean, now? I grope for a connection to that past life, seeking something vital to bring back. One day in a sandy field in Mauritania I found a sunbaked turtle carcass. How it got there was beyond me. But there it was, a shriveled reminder of some wandering urge. . . life’s traces. In America, I will have to search it out in phenomena more complicated and less archetypal; a bus full of people, for example. Why? I am struggling to remain awake; afraid that the obvious will become too familiar and I will forget to see and not just look beyond the surface of things, beyond conformity and mediocrity, into the secret heart of things—being genius—that I saw standing beneath that burning sky looking at that leathery corpse. Writer Robert Maletta lives in Seattle. This is his first story in CSQ. Artist Ronna Neuenschwander lives in Portland. Her work included North African imagery even before she visited the area in 1983-84. 10 Clinton St. Quarterly— Spring, 1987
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