Chapter 2: Between Chaos and Order

An ode to black and white, chaos and order, question and answer.

When we are young, we believe that if we just learn enough, we can map the world.
We line up facts like points on a grid, believing that if we connect them carefully enough,
the world will hold still and make sense to us.

When we are older, we learn that the map is just a story we’ve told ourselves about the terrain, stitched together from the ever-shifting fragments of imperfect knowledge.

It’s not the living ground itself.

I am sitting, hunched under fluorescent lights, sketching a rough set of designs — the iterations fanning out around me in a kaleidoscope of black and white. The room is quiet except for the soft scratch of the pencil against smooth printer paper.

The world contracts to this single grid, three by three on a clean white sheet — the graphite shapes and lines swimming in my vision.

For all the expensive design software installed on the laptop, it sits abandoned at the far end of my desk. At this early stage of a design, nothing quite compares to the old ways: pencil, paper and pen — the most direct path from thought to page.

I am sketching a logomark for a boutique law firm.

When I first met Jane, for coffee, I had been imagining the kind of lawyer you’d see in a courtroom drama, all sharp edges and pinstripes. But Jane breezed into the café in a cozy sweater, immediately disarming me with her warmth and easy conversation. Over coffee we shaped the idea of her brand — one that would feel just like her: intelligent, caring, modern, grounded.

My questions are strategic, but I am listening for something else — a kind of indescribable essence that slips out from the space between her words. Once I catch it, the design will find its way.

I hope.

Now, I sit with pencil and paper. So far, none of the sketches quite match up to the image in my mind’s eye, but each attempt is bringing me a little closer.

Design is a balancing act. Too much thickness and the line looks heavy, too fine and the detail is lost. I hold a sketch out at arm’s length, squint, and lean in again.

This grid of 3 by 3 is my little world and I am the queen of micro-adjustments, searching for the moment when everything clicks into a visual logic that feels inevitable, and Jane’s essence is captured in ink.

I chase a pencil line with pen, correcting the curve of it, suddenly noticing how quiet the office is around me. I look up. It’s 6:45pm — much later than I thought. I notice then, the hunch of my back and straighten out, stretching my arms in a big arc, holding the pose in a vain attempt to undo the hours of poor posture.

It’s dark outside. Below, the streetlamps cast soft pools of amber light onto the pavement, lighting the way to my bus stop. The street shimmers with the memory of rain, streaked with red, orange and white, reflections from traffic lights and passing cars.

I pick out the sketch that feels closest to what I’m after and stack the pile. The design staring up at me is supposed to be the best one, but I screw up my nose in dissatisfaction. I take in the shape of it, committing it to memory, noting what’s working and where the problems are. “I’ll fix you tomorrow,” I tell it, silently.

Grabbing coat and handbag, I slip out of the office, pushing the sliding glass door closed with a click. I cross the empty floor, and press the button for the elevator. Waiting, I turn to take in the waterfront at night. Inside, the office glows brightly; outside, the darkness presses against the glass, the two scenes layered in reflection.

The lift dings and the doors slide open with a hush.

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The bus comes to a stop on my corner and I step out into the cool night. The air is crisp and quiet, nothing but the soft crunch of my boots on the pavement as I walk the shadowy path to our house.

I slide the key into the lock, but the door moves too easily. Carl is already pulling the door open, the house is warm and bright. “Hi honey, sorry I’m late.” Carl gathers me into his arms, his hug warm, his kiss gentle, leading me into the house, where my senses are suddenly flooded with the fragrance of onions caramelizing, and the drone of the extractor fan competing with the sounds of a techno marching band which has turned the kitchen into a kind of electronic carnival.

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Later, when the house is calm and quiet again, carrying a steaming mug of tea, I pad through to the study and settle at my piano. It’s a Yamaha digital stage piano.

I put the headphones on.

Spreading my hands over the cool, smooth keys, I arrange my fingers in the most random pattern I can think of — a jumble of black and white. I press down, letting the chord’s wrongness fill my ears. I play it again, louder this time, letting the chaos swarm around me like a hive of angry bees.

I will now perform my trick.

I pretend I played this chord on purpose and listen closely to each note. Each one asks a question. Some notes feel magnetically pulled to a centre of gravity — a C# that longs to become a C. Some would rather turn in ornamentation around it’s resolution before coming to rest like a dancer circling their partner. Some will hold firm, staying exactly where they are, letting the other notes settle around them and others still want to burst free, spinning up and down the keyboard creating music in their path. I give each note what it wants, I let the chaos resolve into order and I let the order ring out, loud and certain and true.

And then I sit in the resonance as it dissolves into silence, thinking about how, in art, the paths from chaos to order can be so clear. So simple.

I will it so.

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When I was 15 years old, I crossed two checkboxes on a form and heard the distant sound of a door slamming shut.

The guidance counsellor was shaking her head slowly, compassion and concern mixing on her face. Mrs Johnson had called me into her office to discuss my choice of subjects for the following year, and now she was tapping a long painted fingernail against the two ink-checked boxes that she found most confounding.

“Tara, I want you to think carefully about the decision you’re making” she said, choosing her words, “You could choose between music or art and still have a pathway to university, but by choosing both, you’re shutting that door.” I looked at her blankly, her words bouncing off me, utterly meaningless.

In the clear glass of her cabinet door, overlaid on the rows of textbooks and student files, I caught my own reflection — a girl with a pale, round face and strawberry blonde hair tied with a thin hairband. Something defiant in the tilt of my chin told Mrs Johnson that she wasn’t going to change my answer.

Heading down the corridor away from her office, I tugged at the lapel of my too-large blazer in irritation, replaying a parody of the conversation in my head:

“So, Tara, would you like me to saw off your left arm or your right arm? Choose carefully now — you wouldn’t want to pick the wrong one.” Reaching my locker, I unlocked it, kicking it open with a bang, delivering the line that I could never have said in the presence of Mrs Johnson: “I’ll keep both art and music and you can keep your darned pathway to university.”

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I was the culture kid at school. I took both music & art classes, and though none of the other kids would have agreed with my assessment, I felt that it gave me the ultimate superpower: I could stack my art history on top of my music history like layered transparencies – like blueprints.

It was, to me, a kind of x-ray vision.

It’s magical, the way art, music, scientific discoveries, historical events, philosophy and writings of a time all weave together, forming a rich, textured map. One era bleeds into the next, but each has a distinct atmosphere that is entirely its own — a prevailing ideology that echoes from canvas to stone to laboratory to printing press.

I once imagined that if I could just learn enough of the details, I could blink and find myself wandering the echoing galleries of the Uffizi in a 17^th Century Florence — or maybe I would eavesdrop on Degas in an 1870’s Paris, as he sketched his dizzy-spinning ballet dancers.

A distant trumpet calls — it’s muted brassy voice a question, suspended in the air for a long moment.

The pause that follows is holding its breath…

I blink.

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Image Credit: ‘Seated Woman with a Parasol’ by Georges Seurat, France 1885.
Black Conté crayon on ivory laid paper. Art Institute of Chicago.