But Scheler wrote — if I’ve got this right — that Mind, revealed by Kant to be only a relation in the worldweb, was a special kind of window, a gap in Being, an opening that, if directed toward another, allowed him (or her) to appear — like Plato’s form of “The Good”—as both moral and beautiful. The implications, I daresay, were staggering, for Nature, contrary to common sense, needed man to clarify its meaning. (Of course, there was a paradox in this: To say “Man clarifies Nature” is to say, oddly, that “Nature clarifies Nature,” because man is a part of Nature, which suggests, stranger still, that man — if self-forgetful — is not an actor or agent at all.) Scheler’s happy term alethia, “to call forth from concealedness,” advanced the theory that each man, each moment, each blink of the eye, was responsible for obliterating the petty “Old Adam” and conjuring only those visions from perceptual chaos that let be goodness, truth, beauty. So what? So this:
How a better scholar would interpret this, I do not know; but to a plodding, tired man like myself, alēthia meant the celebration of exactly that ugly, lovely black life (so it was to me) I’d fled so long ago in my childhood, as if seeing beauty in every tissue and every vein of a world lacking discipline and obedience to law were the real goal of metaphysics; as if, for all my hankering after Truth in the Academy, Truth had been hidden all along, waiting for my “look” in the cold-water flats between Cottage Grove Avenue and the Rock Island right-of-way.
I was under the spell of this extravagant idea when Wendy Barnes came barreling into my office, sore as hell, banging the door against my wall, and blew noisily up to my desk. “You know what my adviser, the punk, just pulled on me?” She was chewing gum with her mouth open, punishing the wad as if it might be her adviser.
“There now,” I said, professorial. I pushed back my swivel chair. “Tell me about it.”
She slammed shut the door with her hip, then threw herself into a chair. Here then was Wendy in a loose white blouse and open-top brassiere, with a floss of black hair, a wide, thick mouth, and a loud, vibrating voice. I judged her to be twenty-five. She had large, uncanny eyes that sometimes looked brown or sepia, sometimes black with no iris like blobs of oil, sometimes hard and gray like metal. And what of her character? She might have been one of three sassy, well-medicated blues singers backing up James Brown down at the Regal. I thought her vulgar. “I’ve got to get a B to stay in school.” She dipped into her purse for a pack of Kools—“Or they kick me out, see? — then lit a cigarette. Her hands shook, hobbling the flame of her match; then she lifted her head, slanting her eyes at me. “I’ll do anything to get that grade.”
“Anything?” I asked. “Perhaps an incomplete for—”
“You still don’t get it, do you?” She blinked away cigarette smoke curling up her wrist. “Like, I been here goin’ on six years now, and if nothing else, I know how this place works. Like, I ain’t got nothin’ against you, but I ain’t about to go back to no factory, or day-work. If I don’t ace this course — are you listenin’?—I’m gonna have to tell your chairman Dick Dunn and Dean David Mc-Cracken that you been houndin’ me for trim.”
“Me?” I looked up. “Trim?”
“Look”—from my desk she lifted a fountain pen—“I’ll give you an ostensive definition.” Uncapping it, she slowly slid the pen back into the cap. “See?”
Lord, I thought. 0 Lord.
“Like, it’s nothin’ personal, though.” She was at pains to keep this catastrophe on a friendly basis. Aboveboard. “But if I flunk,” she said, “you’re finished.” Then, like a trap door, Wendy’s face sprang open in a beautiful smile. She touched my hand. “I can be nice, too, you know, once you get to know me.”
I didn’t believe her. She’d have to be crazy to say this. It was, for a timid Negro professor who never thought of using his position for leverage, an all-hands-to-the-pump panic. My heart started banging away; I could not snap the room into clarity. She was armed with endless tricks and strategies, this black girl, but Wendy was nobody’s fool — she used Niggerese playfully, like a toy, to bait, to draw me out. She was a witch, yes. A thug. But she had me, rightly or wrongly, at bay. I drew deeply for air. I asked, fighting to steady my voice, “You’d do this?”
“Yeah,” she said. Her nose twitched. “Mrs. Barnes’s baby daughter is strictly business tonight.” And then: “Say what you’re thinkin’.”
My voice shattered. “I haven’t done anything! Nothing! Not to you. Or anyone! Or—”
“So don’t be stupid.” She was standing now, crushing out her cigarette. Her blouse pulled tightly against her bosom. “My mama only got as far as second grade, but she always said, ‘If you gonna be accused of somethin’, you might as well do it.’” She smiled. Deep in my stomach I felt sick. What I felt, in fact, was trapped. Rage as I might, I felt, strangely, that this disaster was somehow all my own doing. Now she opened the office door. “Can we go someplace and talk? Do you hang out?”
Although I do not “hang out” (I checked my fly to make sure), she pulled me in tow downstairs to her sports car, clicked on her tape deck, then accelerated along the Lake Michigan shoreline, her speedometer right on seventy, damned near blowing off both doors, then tooled down Wacker Drive. She drove on, head back, both wrists crossed on the wheel. My square black hat crushed against the roof, hands gripped between my knees, I listened, helplessly, to Michael Jackson on station WVON, then saw the silver hood nose into Chicago’s squalid Fifth Police District. What was this woman thinking? Were we stopping here? In this sewer? Wendy parked beneath the last building on a side street. Lincolns, Fleetwoods, EI Dorados were everywhere. Onto the sidewalk braying music spilled from an old building — hundreds of years old — that looked from below like a cinder block. I sucked in wind. “You live here?”
She gave a quick hiss of laughter. “Are you afraid?” Her eyes, small as nails, angled up to mine.
“Yeah, I know you, Professor. We’re really ‘gods fallen into ruin,’ right? Ain’t that what you said in class? Didn’t you read that when you were a lonely, fat little boy? And you wasted all those years, learned twelve foreign languages, two of them dead ones, you dimwit, wanting Great Sacrifices and trials of faith, believing you could contribute to uplifting the Race — what else would a fat boy dream of? — only to learn, too late, that nobody wants your goddamn sacrifices. For all the degrees and books, you’re still a dork.” Waving her cigarette, she talked on like this, as if I had been perfectly blind my whole life. “Civil rights is high comedy. The old values are dead. Our money is plastic. Our art is murder. Our philosophy is a cackle, obscene and touching, from the tower. The universe explodes silently nowhere, and you’re disturbed, you fossil, by decadent, erotic dreams, lonely, hollowed out, nothing left now but the Book — that boring ream of windy bullshit — you can’t finish.” Her hair crackled suddenly with electricity. “Or maybe one last spiritless fuck, you passéiste, with a student before you buy the farm. Yeah,” she said, opening her door, “I know you, Professor.”