Wave Without A Shore

VII

He went out into Jenks Square and considered the foursquare blankness paved in all directions, stood on the bronze circle which marked the center of Kierkegaard and therefore of all civilization, and tried to envision Waden Jenks, turning on his heel to the bewilderment of those passersby who must recognize the somber Black of a Student, and therefore a purpose which was higher than their own or a talent which exceeded theirs.

The conceit amused him. He laughed aloud, and spun, and finally in the spinning world about him, conceived the image of Waden Jenks, a frozen form of many dimensions, embracing all the square, an element, a structure inside which all the citizens of Kierkegaard must pass in their daily affairs. It would be a sculpture of monumental proportions, a Reality through which others' Realities must pass daily, until their courses were diverted by it and their minds were warped by it and it became like Waden Jenks himself, so subtle an influence it would distort minds and attitudes without the subjects' being aware, and impose terror on those who looked on the whole and recognized it for what it was.

He walked the ten streets of Kierkegaard, omitting his classes; he looked on the exterior of Kierkegaard, the beige and gray of the solid citizens, the workmen, the sellers, the manufacturers, the occasional midnight blue of one no one saw.

His reality. His visions. And Waden Jenks, captured in stone, apertures and textures and surfaces shifting as one passed through them.

He went back to his studio in the University, locked the door, stayed and sketched and planned, mad with the vision.