The sun and its surface
The sun that surfaced between a morning and afternoon of writing, inspired by The Piazza by Herman Melville.
Around two weeks ago, an essay I’d written was selected as a runner-up for Roxane Gay’s inaugural book club essay contest. My essay, Daring to Love a Durian Fruit, was a sequel to an essay that I published three years ago now (!!) in the Emerging Writers Series. I’m so honored that both pieces have passed through the hands of gracious writing stewards.
As I thought about what this meant to me, I returned the sun that surfaced between a morning and afternoon of editing the essay, Daring to Love a Durian Fruit.
I stayed back that day. Stole a few hours beneath the sloping visage of Arthur’s Seat. I joined the public canvas, a plane of stately grass behind Hollyrood Palace. A jacket over my head. The sun was a perfect friend, its soft hug. Was this fairy land? I hadn’t wanted or looked for such a thing, yet in this place, I felt lighter. There was more air, more light passing through. I watched dogs run greedily across their field.
Warmed now, I was ready to find a great shady tree. But to retreat into the trees was to stow away from the open field. And it was this open field that was the day’s enchantment.
Just then, a small building glinted. I became curious but also suspicious. What was this lone place, modern amidst such aged beauty. When I reached, the building opened a seat for me. Its benevolent structure became space for sun and shade.
Knowing the brevity of my stay, what thoughts I had arrived in poems. I wrote them in my notebook. Then I set my notebook behind my head, a pillow. Precious, how one can make a nook out of nothing.
Life was here but not forever. The clouds visited then passed over. There was such a thing as overdoing one’s stay. My face was hot but not yet drowsy. Reluctantly, I began inch away until I was looking back to see Arthur’s Seat behind me. I had tea and scone, then retrieved my bags from the hostel, my luggage protesting against the cobblestone.
Then I was on the evening train to St. Andrews, where my friend was getting married the next day. My friends were already there at rehearsal. Soon, all of us together.
I pulled out my computer and began to edit the essay that I had put away. The train pulled us into the fields. The sun was now overshadowed by the golden surface. I wanted to finish the essay. I read and reread it, and it felt endless and near. Occasionally I looked up, then around. This was my second time in the UK. Last time, seven years ago, I was studying abroad. I slept in a dormitory, ate chocolate digestives and tortellini. I did not have an essay, but I wanted one. Now, with more, I know that I have lost in other ways.
I sent the essay into the invisible portal, not knowing it would come back carrying a little gift. I felt that I needed to celebrate. But how? I wrote of my grandmothers and my mother, from whom I’ve learned of love, its tenderness and its tentacles. I held the words in my hands, feeling a vast stretch of land before me. In time, I will begin rereading.
In this short story called The Piazza by Herman Melville, we meet a narrator who is charmed by a glint in the mountains. He ventures out for fairy land, but meets instead a girl who has also been tricked by the “mirage haze.” From the mountain, the narrator’s old farm house is gilded by the sunset just as brightly.
The sun shines upon both homes, from different perspectives, at different times of day. Despite the story’s moral simplicity, the writing teems with the branches of undergrowth. Nature, the sun but also “the blackberry brakes that tried to pluck me back” and the “raspberry bushes – willful assertors of their right of way” are all so alive. Our narrator in The Piazza is so porous. In old age, or perhaps because of it, he is fooled by the mysteries in sun and shadow. He enters the mountains looking for magical potential, leaves “haunted by Marianna’s face, and many as real a story.” The indirectness of the words that end The Piazza makes me think that the lesson is not quite learned, that our narrator still eager to leave his post. I imagine him looking for something in the distance, warned now but irresistibly charmed by the glimmering middle.
The sun and its surface saw the moon, full for two nights, one of which we sang at midnight, happy birthday.