Stonework Issue 5

Alan Belford has published articles and essays in Canoe and Kayak, Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, and Backpacker. He is currently in a PhD program in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida

Emilie Griffin is the author of many books on the spiritual life, including Clinging: The Experience of Prayer, The Reflective Executive: A spirituality of Business and Enterprise and Homeward Voyage: Reflections on Life Changes. After a long career as an advertising executive, she works as a retreat and workshop leader as a member of the Renovare Ministry Team. She is a member of the Catholic commission on Intellectual and Cultural Affairs.

Tineke Hegeman is a senior writing major at Houghton College.

Nan Hussey is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Houghton College.

Virginia Stem Owens is the author of sixteen books. They include several mystery novels, memoirs, and works of nonfiction. Recent works include Looking for Jesus and Living Next door to the Death House (with her husband, David Clinton Owens). A member of the editorial board of Books & Culture, she blogs at virginiastemowens.blogspot.com.

Eric A. Potter teaches at Grove City College. His poems have appeared in The Christian Century, First Things and Christianity and Literature.

Debra Reinstra is Associate Professor of English at Calvin College. She is the author of two works of nonfiction: Great with Child: On Becoming a Mother and So Much More: An invitation to Christian Spirituality.

Jillian Sokso is an assistant professor of art at Houghton college. She holds a bachelor's from the Moore College of Art and design and a master's of fine arts from the University of Delaware.

Dain Trafton is a retired professor of literature who lives in Philips, Maine. His academic writing is mainly on English, French, and Italian writers (including translations of Torquato Tasso). Now he is writing short stories and a novel. This is his first published poem.

James Wardwell, Associate Professor of English at Houghton College, is the most faithful contributor to Stonework. This is his fifth essay on poets writing in the English devotional tradition.

Common Elements

2008-01-25T11:56:00.001-08:00

“The Ocean of true grace:” Aemelia Lanyer Presents Jesus

2008-01-25T11:48:00.000-08:00

~James Wardwell

You whose clear Judgement far exceeds my skill,

Vouchsafe to entertain this dying lover,

The Ocean of true grace, whose streams do fill

All those with Joy, that can his love recover;

About this blessed Ark bright angels hover:

Where your fair soul may safely rest,

When he is sweetly seated in your breast.

(“To the Lady Lucie, Countess of Bedford,” 15-21)

As a seventeenth-century English woman Aemelia Bassano Lanyer offers a unique, devotional voice. From one woman’s point of view, she enriches her reader’s appreciation of the Bible while steadfastly focusing on Jesus as her “lovely love.” Her singular volume of published poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), sacramentally presents the Lord as someone she knows and believes her readers can relationally experience in and through her poems. Jesus is the “blessed Ark,” the vessel that both navigates and transports the “Ocean of true grace,” even as her poems, she prays, might effectually prove “this blessed Ark” (emphasis mine). In the passage quoted above, bringing together two Ark references, Noah’s as God’s refuge and salvation and the Ark of the Covenant around which “bright angels hover” symbolizing God’s presence with his people, Lanyer displays her knowledge of the scripture and her desire to engage herself and her audience in salvation’s story.

Although as, and in some ways more, accomplished as many of her peers in devotional literature, Lanyer is less known to generally educated readers. Through several public records, a few possible autobiographical references in her poems, and the dubious diary of her alleged astrologer Simon Forman, we can only sketchily reconstruct a life of both accomplishment and strain. Aemelia was born in 1569 to Jewish Italian musicians working in the court of Queen Elizabeth the First. Although her father died when she was only seven, Aemelia seems to have enjoyed the benefits of court life, including, it would seem from her later writings, an education by proximity.

When she was eighteen, her mother died and she received the perhaps less desirably beneficial attention of Henry Cary, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain and Shakespeare’s patron. Although married and forty-five years older than Aemelia, Cary paid her living expenses and when she was pregnant, arranged her marriage to Captain Alphonso Lanyer. She named the baby Henry. Most of the details of her early adulthood we know from the diary of an astrologer, Simon Forman, who gives us enough detail to suspect his complete authenticity. She suffered through numerous miscarriages, the death of her daughter Odillya, legal battles over her inheritance, disputes over a patent, a harsh husband who “consumed her goods,” and two years of starting, running, and teaching in a school as her only means of sustaining herself in widowhood.

Although her later years were spent in and around her son’s home, he died twelve years before her. Sometime in first half of the seventeenth century she seems to have become acquainted with the female, literary luminaries of the day including Mary Sidney Herbert, Margaret and Anne Clifford. In 1610, she published “The Description of Cooke-ham,” which may have been the first poem in the tradition of celebrating English country houses, and which proclaims her religious conversion. The following year she produced the first full length book of poetry by a woman in English, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.

Certainly, an initial contribution to her reader’s devotional life is Lanyer’s perspective as a woman. She presents godly, virtuous women. Salve Deus begins with eleven commendatory dedication pieces (nine in poetry), including ones to the Queen (James I’s wife) and “To all virtuous Ladies in general.” In her recalling of the events of the passion, the reader is struck by the contrast of all the villains being men while the women contribute the positives of intuitive insight, compassion, sacrifice and commitment. At the foot of the cross, after the death of her son, Lanyer observes “the sorrow of the virgin Mary,” remembering her there as the girl mystified by the call to be a chaste mother, “To bear a child, although a Virgin pure” (1064):

When on the knees of thy submissive heart

Thou humbly didst demand, How that should be? (1073-1074)

Lanyer’s exploration of the virgin birth and of the same mother’s grief at the death of her son gives us all “more cause to wonder and admire” (1080). Late in the poem, Lanyer celebrates in brief the faithful lives of Deborah and Judith, Esther and Susanna (1480-1568). Theirs and all Godly women’s love is contrasted to Cleopatra’s.

Her Love was earthly, and thy Love Divine;

Her Love was only to support her pride,

Humility thy Love and Thee doth guide. (1414-1416)

Pilate’s wife, “who did but dream, and yet a message sent,” plays a major role in Lanyer’s record of the passion. She harkens to a dream and rightly warns her husband not “To seek the death of him that is so good / For thy soul’s health to shed his dearest blood” (839-840). In an attempt to convince him not to slay his Savior, Pilate’s wife issues an apology for Eve and thereby for all women (761-840). Her arguments range from the seemingly erroneous Adam didn’t find fault with Eve eating the fruit (805-806) to mildly humorous men say women aren’t as intelligent as men, so Eve didn’t and couldn’t know any better. She suggests that Adam could have known better because as the first created he had known God longer. Eve’s innocence was tricked by the “subtle Serpent” (767). She was only sharing; her “fault was only too much love / Which made her give this present to her Dear” (801-802). Just because Eve ate the fruit didn’t mean that Adam had to: “Strength might have refused.”

Eventually, Lanyer’s assertions become more pointed. “If any Evil did in [Eve] remain, / Being made of [Adam], he was the ground of all” (815-816). Further still, she batters men with the comparison between eating the fruit, which she seems to grant women may have initiated, and the crucifixion of the Christ which men perpetrated.

Her sin was small, to what you [Pilate] do commit;

All mortal sins that do for vengeance cry,

Are not to be compared unto it:

If many worlds would altogether try,

By all their sins the wrath of God to get;

This sin of yours, surmounts them all as far

As doth the Sun, another little star. (818-824)

Lanyer is battling systemic injustice against women which disproportionately holds them responsible for the evil in the world. She doesn’t seek complete exoneration, only even handed consideration. At last Pilate’s wife appeals to sentiment. “You came not in the world without our pain” (827). Before men treat women too harshly, they should remember their mothers were women who sacrificed their bodies to birth men.

A second contribution Lanyer makes to her reader’s devotional life is mediation upon the scriptures. Interestingly, she publishes Salve Deus in 1611, the same year the King James Bible first appeared. Among the noble women of her immediate audience, Bible translation was a regular devotional practice. Of public note, Mary Sidney Herbert rendered in meter and rhyme most of Psalms circulated under the names of she and her more famous brother Sir Philip Sidney. However, mostly as a private practice, imaginatively realigning and turning biblical phrases and stories produced insight. Recreations into English of the scriptures’ beauty memorably embedded the words in the heart.

The better part of Lanyer’s work, as the title suggests, is her recounting of and reflections on Christ’s passion as found in Matthew 26:30-28:10. Later in the seventeenth century, when John Milton similarly attempts by reworking the scriptures into English poetry to produce something “doctrinal and exemplary to the nation,” the passion receives little attention. Milton Conversely, Lanyer’s profundity lies in her solicitation of the emotions both from the biblical account and in her readers. She invokes the Spirit that she might “show [Christ’s] Death, by which we do inherit / Those endless Joys that our hearts do fill” (325-326). found reason, knowledge, and wisdom to be the guides to a “paradise within.”

When before He is arrested, Jesus predicts their betrayals to “his dear Disciples” the emotions are frothy in contrast. Granted the moment will never be considered the highlight of Peter’s spiritual journey, but he is indignant at the suggestion of his inconstancy. He “thought his faith could never fail / No mote could happen in so clear a sight” (341-342). Lanyer augments the conflict by echoing Jesus’ warning in the Sermon on the Mount to not pick splitters from a brother’s eye when there is a tree in your own and applies it to Peter. Ironically, he “thought above them all, by Faith to clime.” That he will deny “his dear Master” is overwrought with emotion.

This could not choose but grieve him very sore,

That his hot Love should prove more cold than Ice,

Denying him he did so much adore. (347-349)

In the Gethsemane sequence, the emotional impact of contrasts is extended. Jesus moves further in to pray against the wishes of the twelve. Only Peter, John and James, “three dear friends,” follow. There Jesus, being “sorrowful” and “overcharged with grief,” “opened all his woe” to them. He held their friendship so “intrust,” He effectually granted them permission “His deepest griefs” to “discuss” (371-376). By His transparency, making himself emotionally vulnerable to His three friends gave them a golden opportunity to minister to his needs. But they missed the opportunity and Christ’s self exposure combined with their insensitivity only made his burden greater; only proved “To re-ore-charge thy overburdened soul.” Given the charge, in the words of the earliest catechism, to “Watch and Pray,” they fell asleep. “Even those three Friends” “could not watch one hour for love of thee” (419, 418). Paraphrasing and extending Matthew 26:41 Lanyer writes:

Although the Spirit was willing to obey,

Yet what great weakness in the Flesh was found!

They slept in ease, whilst thou in Pain didst pray;

Lo, they in Sleep, and thou in Sorrow drowned. (425-428)

This brief analysis of Salve Deus from the prediction of betrayal through the disciples sleeping in Gethsemane exemplifies how Lanyer enhances appreciation for the Bible by observing and eliciting the emotions inherent in the gospel and in its characters. In like manner, she employs this technique to the edification of her readers through the events of the passion including the resurrection.

What I have said so far might lead to the conclusion that Lanyer is a feminist to the disparagement of men, but this is not the case. Her unabated worship of the man Jesus interdicts any such conclusion. In fact, her presentation of Jesus as lover of the church and members thereof becomes the third way Lanyer leads her readers in devotional development.

Over and over in the prefatory poems Lanyer says that her intend is to present Jesus himself. In the first poem, “To the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty,” she asserts “Here may your sacred Majesty behold / That mighty Monarch both of heaven and earth” (43-44). He is the “Paschal Lamb” of her poetry and she invites the reader to commune with him in them: “This precious Passover feed upon, O Queen” (85, 89). In “To the Lady Susan,” she writes, “Receive your Love whom you have sought so far, / Which here presents himself within your view” (37-38). In the prose piece to her patron Lady Margaret, she straightforwardly claims that in her poems “I present unto you even our Lord Jesus himself.” Even the allegorical dream poem to Mary Sidney Herbert concludes that the reader might “receive him here” (221). Her last introductory poem, “To the Lady Anne, Countess of Dorset,” builds to

Therefore to you (good Madame) I present

His lovely love, more worthy than purest gold,

Who for your sake his precious blood hath spent,

His death and passion here you may behold,

And view this Lamb that to the world was sent,

Whom your fair soul may in her arms enfold:

Loving his love, that did endure such pain,

That you in heaven a worthy place might gain. (113-120)

Lanyer praises God with the names and modifiers she ascribes to Jesus. “The Ocean of true grace;” “the health of the soul;” “this most precious pearl of all perfection;” “this rich diamond of devotion;” “the sweet incense, balsams, odors and gums that flow from that beautiful tree of Life;” “super-excellent;” “the inestimable treasure of all elected souls.” In the passion poem, He is “sweet,” and “silly,” and “kind.” Kind because He bears the fruit of the Spirit in being nice. But also in that he is one of two kinds: humankind and divinity-kind. Before Caiaphas He is

The beauty of the World, Heaven’s chiefest Glory;

The mirror of Martyrs, Crown of holy Saints;

Love of the Almighty, blessed Angels story;

Water of Life, which none that drinks it, faints;

Guide of the Just, where all our Light we borrow;

Mercy of Mercies; Hearer of Complaints;

Triumpher over Death; Ransomer of Sin;

Falsely accused. (641-648)

Aemelia Lanyer embracers this Christ as a lover. That she would focus of such a metaphor seems striking as Henry Cary, Alphonso Lanyer, and Simon Forman pursued her and used her in a less than optimal manner. Nevertheless her message “To all virtuous Ladies in general” is “Put on your wedding garment,” “the Bridegroom stays to entertain you” (8-9). The verb “entertain” echoes Spenser’s use of it in his Amoretti # 68 written to his third wife: “So let us love, dear love, like as we ought / Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.” “To the Lady Arabella” likens Christ to a knight dying for a maid “who all forsook / That in his dying arms he might embrace / Your beauteous Soul, and fill it with his grace” (12-14). After His resurrection, Salve Deus includes “a brief description of his beauty upon the Canticle.”

This is that Bridegroom that appears so fair,

So sweet, so lovely in his Spouses sight,

That onto Snow we may his face compare,

His cheeks like scarlet, and his eyes so bright

As purest Doves that in the rivers are,

Washed with milk, to give the more delight

His head is likened to the finest gold,

His curled locks so beauteous to behold:

The canticle continues another full stanza (1305-1312).

In the end, “To the Lady Katherine Countess of Suffolk” best sums up Aemelia Lanyer’s love of Christ. Herein she recommends her “little Book” to the lady’s daughters as “heavenly food” that they may feed upon. “Here they may see a Lover much more true / Than ever was since first the world began” (52-53). He is a “poor rich King,” a “spotless Lamb,” a “perfect patient Dove.” He is a mighty warrior “bathing in his blood” battling “loathsome death with grim and ghastly look” (54, 58, 62, 65).

Yet through the sable Clouds of Shame & Death,

His beauty shows more clearer than before;

Death lost his strength when he [i.e. Christ] did loose his breath:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

So in Death’s ashy pale discolored face

Fresh beauty shined, yielding far greater grace. (73-75, 77-78)

This triumphant lover, having defeated her greatest foe, Death, is all any Lady can desire. If she desires beauty, “who has been more fair than he?” His wisdom is of a depth that cannot be fathomed. Of Kingdoms, wealth, honor and fame, no one possesses more. He has zeal, love, grace, piety, constancy, faith, obedience, valor, patience, sobriety, chastity, meekness, justice, mercy, bounty and love beyond “compare” (91-96). His virtues are “more than thoughts can apprehend.” So Aemelia Lanyer leaves us in our “More clear imagination” to meditate on and contemplate in her poems and in his person

His rare parts, true honors fair prospect,

The perfect line that goodness doth direct.

All the quotations from Aemelia Lanyer in this essay were taken from The Poems of Aemelia Lanyer, edited by Susanne Woods, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993. I have modernized spellings wherever helpful.

Inaugural Literature - Introduction

2008-01-25T10:57:00.001-08:00

Three artists were commissioned to present work at the October 5 concert celebrating the inauguration of Shirley A. Mullen as the fifth president of Houghton College. Stonework is delighted to make these works available to a larger public.

Gary Baxter, California native and Professor of Art, has aught at Houghton College for 30 years and holds a BA degree in Art from SUNY Geneseo and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of Art and Design at Rochester Institute of Technology. Professor Baxter’s work in ceramics is frequently featured at galleries, most recently in the 2004 Clay National Exhibition at Skidmore College and the 2005 Philadelphia Craft Show.

Common Elements - by Gary Baxter

Mark Hijleh, raised near Kansas City, Missouri, and Professor of Composition and Conducting, has taught at Houghton College since 1993. He holds Masters and Doctoral degrees in composition and conducting from Ithaca College and Peabody Conservatory and is completing an MA degree in World Music from the University of Sheffield (U.K.). He is the recipient of several composition awards, and his works have been performed by major orchestras in the U.S. and the U.K.

For Such a Time as This – by Mark Hijleh

Professor John Leax, a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Houghton College Poet-in-Residence, is the author of ten books of poetry, prose and fiction. His most recent books areGrace is Where I Live, a collection of essays, and Tabloid News, a sequence of poems. He has taught in the Houghton College writing program since 1968.

Walking the Ridge Home – by John Leax

Walking the Ridge Home

2008-01-25T10:33:00.000-08:00

~John Leax

With my whole heart I want to praise Thee

In snow calf-deep I climb the ridge through pioneer forest—

the trees

thorn apples crowding the field’s edge

yield ground under shadowing black cherry ash

and straight white oak

the river at my back

frozen in February light a promise imagination claims in darkness

Here I have kicked grouse exploding

from sheltering drifts

and jumped back delighted in surprise

And I have tracked turkey following the arrows

of their feet backwards

to the high ground of their roosts

On this cold day

in the wind descending to the tallest oaks

the tallest oaks yielding

as if called

(obedient to the leading)

arc rooted trails against the silver sky

I place my feet with care

plunge my stick through the sharp crust

to find the holding earth

heart pounding breathe breathe

through the trees arcing

in the wind turning on the ridge

in the surrounding light

the light of the valley

the light above me

the light below me

the light of the world

Oh darken not to me Thy light

The descent beckons—

the heart prints trail away

from the narrow path

half filled

obscured in the time of their passing

by the dust of snow

I follow

Under the hemlocks

the down sweeping branches

catching my watch cap

lifting it lightly

snow imperturbably cold

like a leather collar

on the back of my neck

when I release the branch

from my hand

The inclusive silence of the wood

contains the day’s vernacular

as the sky contains the silver light

the hollow thunk

of woodpecker pounding

the combustive thrum of cars

in the valley

foot steps

even the wind

if it blows

through the oak tops

like the acorns

falling into shade

has no given word

to liven the dumb darkness

of the grove

Teach us dear Lord to number our days

Where the ground falls away

paying the debt

of the steep slope

logged and forgotten

the charred remains of fire

a circle of stone

a tent of deadfalls

tossed against an oak

adequate perhaps

to shelter

a saint at prayer

ii.

Where the apples grow

gnarled

and tart

so good every autumn

walk

strays to bite

again

that clean flesh

of the lost garden

gone for good

iii.

Where the plantation pines

rise in afternoon light—

a convocation of crows

insolent in shining

regalia mobs

the mouse-satisfied

owl

O satisfy us early with Thy mercy

At the edge of this opening in the woods

the poplars

I declare with the Psalmist

lift up their arms in elegant leaflessness

praising you with the white sheen of their bark

with their rooted journeys in the wind

with the crooked fingers of their hands

spread to receive the blessing of your snow

O that I might stand in their silent choir

a stilled voice going like them no where in the whirl

of the world turning in time

O that I might be mindless of the loss

that has brought me to this place of your making

and unmaking

But you have made me mindful

filled my mouth with words to name

the crow the owl the mouse

you have made me mindful

to love the predator and prey

to taste on my tongue the sacrament

all creation eats

one life for many

such mercy the blessing of your snow

Establish Thou the work of our hands

oikos—earthhold

the kingdom of God

the economy of culture

minding the world

a burl of words

white pine in rows

even aged

(stepping down to the little stream

descending

from the far slash

of quick profit)

work of the passing mind

intending renewal

Commercially difficult

poorly formed

unacceptable

growing stock

Harvest is recommended Removal of inferior pine

of highest importance Openings can be made

where hardwood introduction has begun

In the cathedral light of failure become

shade I stand stilled in ambition’s end.

On the snow

banked beside me

a pile of bones

disarticulated

and in the stream

the bridge

drawn down

by water’s mindless

inclination

to fall

Let all the tumult within me cease.

I know O Lord you speak in words made flesh

in the chick-a-dee dee

sounding from the thicket

in the canopy creak of the oaks

straining for the light

in water slushing

under ice

With my whole heart

I would serve you

serve you with my finest praise

lifting as freely as mist from the snow

but words lodge homeless

in my throat

Once long ago in the Siskiyous I crossed

open scree near a mountain’s summit

Far to the south

Shasta rose

luminous

the hope

of Paradise

in California cloud

I sucked—in one breath—

the emptiness

the terrible beauty of your way

O how can I know you

how comprehend what mystery caused

you to speak once in word

and once in flesh

O So Close Disclosing

Knowing If Not Known

I am all longing

Speak

This dwelling, O God, by Thee be blest

If you should take back your Spirit Lord

and gather to yourself your breath

all all would perish

the little stream plunging

like laughter

into the larger creek cutting this opening

in the ridge rising

from the ancient bed

of the distant river

the hemlock grove

shielding its flow

heavily stocked

in need of future treatment

the hardwood stand

rising in light on the gentler slope

around the point

white oak hickory ash

well spaced for optimum growth

the orioles who hang their nests

and sing bright splashes

in the leafing tops each spring

these words I say

giving up all claim

to make with them

any world not made

already by your grace

my friend walking here in autumn swelter

“One could make this a place of worship”

Up the knobby spine

Thy kingdom come

I place my feet with care

Thy will be done

plunge my stick through the sharp crust

on earth

heart pounding breathe breathe

through the trees arcing

in the wood bending word

as it is

climbing home

in the surrounding light

the light of the valley

the light above me

the light below me

the light of the world

forever and ever

Joy Joy

Losing Language

2008-01-23T06:41:00.001-08:00

an excerpt from Caring for Mother

~ Virginia Stem Owens

Mental, cognitive, intellect—are these all different categories? Does one fit within another like nested dolls? How do they connect to one's physical being, to nerves, synapses, motor skills? What binds brain to body? Mind to brain? Soul to self?

These are the questions that consumed me as I watched this woman who once memorized medical vocabularies, who quoted reams of Scripture, who juggled employee rosters and payrolls, as she dissolved into a puddle of unknowing.

I had already discovered that my mother's brain was not producing dopamine properly. Without this neurotransmitter, the electrical impulses, which ordinarily would signal her muscles to move, get jammed or misdirected. This accounted for her slowed and uncertain gait, laggard speech, hand tremors. All classic Parkinson's symptoms.

I knew too that the substantia nigra, the bit of brain tissue responsible for producing dopamine, dies more rapidly in Parkinson's patients than in the rest of us. The drug levadopa, popularly known as L-dopa, has until recently been the only medication available for treating the disease. Once absorbed by the brain, L-dopa is converted to dopamine.

One might conclude, as I did, that treating Parkinson's was thus a simple matter of adding the right amount of L-dopa at the right time. Like mixing gasoline and oxygen in the proper ratio so spark plugs can fire the car engine.

But here I fell victim to an inadequate paradigm. For one thing, a car engine, even at its peak performance, never produces its own gasoline. An automobile's internal organs do not whisper messages to one another along extended pathways. Not even the computerized sensors in newer models come close to approximating the delicate interchanges that transpire between biochemicals in the body.

Synthetic L-dopa is no mere gas tank additive. For one thing (I would not learn this for another year), once you have started adding L-dopa to your brain, you can never stop taking the drug. Put a healthy person with no previous Parkinson symptoms on L-dopa and, should he stop taking the medication, he will develop tremors and other manifestations of the disease. Like a malingerer on the dole, the dopamine-producing section of the brain quits working if it knows it can depend on chemical welfare.

Also, L-dopa, while the most effective treatment for Parkinsonian symptoms, is also the most problematic. My mother struggled with the overwhelming waves of nausea it caused, even though the form she took also contained carbidopa, an additive designed to reduce L-dopa's side effects.

Hallucinations, I learned, were yet another unwelcome consequence of the drug. I remembered references to hallucinations in some of the Parkinson's books my mother had read so avidly the first summer. Most of these were casual allusions to visual distortions, made almost airily, as though they were a minor inconvenience. Firsthand accounts by patients who hallucinated on the drug treated their visions as a joke. One woman reported setting an extra place at the table for the "guest"—invisible to everyone else but her.

To my mother, however, hallucinations had been no joke. She connected the term to drugs like marijuana and LSD. Making any allusion to her hallucinations would have been tantamount to accusing her of drug addiction.

It is easy to get caught in the vortex of dementia. How do you tell if a person is describing a real or an imagined incident? How do you quantify the content of their conversation? Can you believe 90 percent of what they say? Less? Half? And how do you filter the fiction from the facts?

Did she really misplace the prescription slip or is this merely a ruse to keep you from filling it? Did she really receive a phone call from your brother? The doctor's office?

While she had still been at home, I had guessed wrong in such situations. Doubt poisoned the atmosphere, pumped up the paranoia. You hate being suspicious; she hates being accused. You contrive unobtrusive ways to check facts. She, in turn, becomes defensive and isolated.

We are sitting at her dining table, eating lunch, my father and mother, our cousin Margaret, and me. Margaret is trying to entertain us with tales of her new litter of barn cats.

"They get up under the house—I can't for the life of me figure out where they're getting in. Half a dozen of them."

"That many?" I say.

"Yes. They get to chasing and carrying on. It makes a terrible racket."

"I can believe it," my father puts in, shaking his head. My mother looks up sharply, then back at her plate. "I wish someone would do that for me."

"Do what?" I ask.

"Believe what I say."

What, I was still wondering at the end of that first year, should be my response to the obvious fabrications of her imagination? Should I contradict her? Expose the fantasies for what they were? Should I just ignore them? Play along? What, after all, do you say to someone who tells you, quite seriously, that people are building Buddhist temples in the pines behind her house? If I challenged this account or even gently explained the outlandishness of such a claim, she first got angry and then remote.

My father took the path of least resistance, accommodating her fears of invasion by propping chairs under all the doorknobs before they went to bed at night. But his accommodation did not lessen my mother's panic and dread. She continued to get him up in the middle of the night to search for intruders, then grew angry when he failed to find any.

Exasperated, I took the opposite tack, steadfastly denying all her delusions.

"No, Mother," I would say when she insisted the puddle I drove through was blood or seeping oil. "It's just water. Remember? It rained last night."

Doggedly I pointed out logical inconsistencies.

"See?" I would say as we took our afternoon walk down the lane. "There's been no fire here. Do you see any ashes, any burn marks on the trees?" But my reasoning only made her keep these realities to herself.

I could see that my strategy was no more successful than my father's.

I searched the library, the Internet, disease newsletters for advice. Nothing. I called my cousin, the psychologist. "So what do I do?" I wailed. "If I play along, pretend there really are Buddhist temples down in the woods—my brother, by the way, is supposedly in on this conspiracy—if I show concern about Indians attacking the house, won't that undermine whatever grasp she still has on reality?"

"Beats me," my cousin said. "I've never really had to deal with this problem. That's not my population. People in that shape generally end up in institutions."

Once, as I sat on the bed beside my mother, holding her hand, she wept from frustration because I wouldn't admit there were strangers in the attic.

"No one believes me," she cried.

"I believe you, Mother," I heard myself saying. "It is real— real to you." And for a time I was proud of this answer. It offered affirmation if not agreement. But it neither fooled nor satisfied her. She saw through my subterfuge.

Physical disabilities I could handle. And I would have laughed at the loss of mental infirmities of the merely cognitive sort—the spelling and math. Memory loss I could understand, compensate for. But her dark imaginings threatened to undo me because they undid her. They expunged the woman I knew as my mother. Defaced all that I admired and honored in her.

Like most people living close to a life-altering disease, I checked myself constantly, convinced from time to time that I too had Parkinson's, even though I knew it is neither contagious nor, generally speaking, hereditary.

Learning how rudimentary medical knowledge of the disease is, I was skeptical even of that reassurance. Initially, if a cup shook in my hand, if I missed a step going up the stairs, I took it as the first sign that my brain was starved for dopamine.

Though I learned in time to discount these fears, what did not go away was the old vertiginous uncertainty about selfhood. If my mother, as we say, was not herself, then who was she? What was she? What, come to that, were any of us?

How—by what process—do you become another self? Or perhaps no one at all? It is easy for anyone who has lived with dementia to consider demon possession a real possibility. Those Bible stories of people infested with evil spirits made perfect sense to me. They go as far as most other verbal formulations to explain what's going on: they are the anti-self, the not oneself overwhelming the true self. The demon theory pictures the self locked up and brutalized by marauding invaders. The medical explanation posits a self stupefied by chemical starvation. But whether we say dementia or demons, both terms assume that some entity called the self actually exists, that it is not simply some fancy we have invented.

Some of the worst damage to my mother's brain showed up as aphasia, a loss in the ability to speak or to comprehend written or spoken language. This became more severe as the months went by. Aphasia put up enormous obstacles to our life together. I was often uncertain that she understood what I said to her. She would sometimes frown and ask me to repeat; my words either hadn't registered or hadn't been recognized. Sometimes she merely turned away, as if the effort to understand was too great or the results too disheartening.

Communication between my parents, never too good at the best of times, was even more difficult. My mother's voice was weak and my father's hearing poor. Many people tended to talk over her, asking a question and then not giving her enough time to respond before they rattled on, either impatient or uncomfortable with more than a few seconds of silence.

I found little scraps of paper on the bureau or nightstand in her room with letters or numbers written on them in her by then tiny, quavering script. None of them made any sense.

My father came across a letter to Ann Landers in the paper one day about an Alzheimer's patient who was helped by reading aloud, so he began bringing her the local newspaper to read every morning. But though my mother made out a few words, she couldn't understand what they meant.

Her own speech fluctuated widely. On good days she could form short sentences, and, if we were talking about something right before us—her glass of cranberry juice or her wheelchair —the sentences sometimes even made sense. "The phone is ringing," or "I don't want that." Often though she had to grope for an accurate word and only hit one near it in sound or meaning. "Turn off the balloon," she might say, and I'd know, somehow, that she meant the air-conditioner.

"What did you have for lunch?" I would ask.

''A few steamed scrimmage," she replied. "Or something that looked like shammy."

Sometimes she realized the word she'd used wasn't the one she intended, more often not. In the midst of searching for the word she meant, she would sometimes try to spell it. But the letters—never more than three—were random. "P, T, N," she might say, frowning with the effort to bring forth language.

Her pronouns never had clear referents, probably because names eluded her. "Where do they live now?" she would ask me suddenly.

"Who, Mother?"

"You know," she insisted, obviously believing I was only pretending ignorance. "The people who moved."

"Moved?" And I would give my usual answer to these murky inquiries.

"I'm not sure."

She understood all time as now, all space as here. Her mental difficulties were not quite the same as the Alzheimer's type of memory-loss. In fact, her memory—when she could find the language to verbalize it—was not bad. Her sense of time and space, like that of a young child, was dominated by the present. She could not juggle temporal or spatial abstractions any better than a three-year-old who asks "are we there yet?" from the back seat of the car.

Trying to overcome her depleted conversation skills, she would sometimes employ metaphors whose referents were known only to her. When she had a bowel movement, for instance, she was "making little houses."

Sometimes I would laugh and make a joke of her strange locutions, and she would laugh too. Those were the good days.

On most days, however, she merely rambled, beginning lengthy, narratives of some fantasy trip or encounter with distant family members which would proceed for a phrase or two in one direction, then make sudden oblique turns into blind alleys. The words meandered like a trickle of water across packed dry dirt, its sporadic progress gradually drying up. At such times she seemed unaware of her aphasia, evidently taking pleasure in the simple process of speech. She could keep talking for half an hour at a stretch, never suspecting that her tales were disjointed and impenetrable. All the characters were pronouns or, at most, generic—"that boy," "those people." If I was able to catch her general drift, I tried to play along, ask her questions, just to keep her talking.

"Here," she'd say, pushing toward me a blanket she'd wadded into a ball, "take this to her and tell them it's all I could get done."

"Okay, Mother. I'm sure they'll understand. This is all they'll need anyway."

On bad days, neither I nor anyone else could make even meager sense of what she tried to mean. The sounds were no longer sentences or even words, just garbled syllables. “At night ... take shy ... wargen ... sima, sima."

These unsuccessful struggles with words used to embarrass me. When she came out with a long string of incomprehensible syllables and looked at me insistently, urgently, expecting me to respond, I could only stare at her. How do you tell someone, in a nice way, that they're babbling? At some point, even pretense is impossible.

When I was no longer able to follow a thread of meaning, I had to admit I was lost. "I'm sorry, Mother. I can't understand. The words aren't coming out right." Sometimes she tried again, even more urgently, but never with any better success. Other times, she simply sighed and closed her eyes and gave up. I was not sure which was worse. I mopped tears from the well of her eye socket during a conversation in which the only word of hers I understood was "lonely."

There was another kind of day, too, whose category was ambiguous. It was bad in that she scarcely recognized where she was. Her words became mere cooings, half-whispered, half sung syllables. Yet she didn't seem upset. In fact, she could have a remarkably gentle spirit, even smile contentedly. I suspect she might not have even recognized me then. There, I think, she's gone. Over the edge. Beyond the pale. To never-never land.

On those days her fear seemed to have disappeared. And I found I preferred this state. In fact, I felt a remarkable sense of lightness, of relief. Taking care of this dazed creature lying in the bed was almost like tending a baby. Irritation, anxiety disappeared for me too. Tenderness returned.

This relief, however, was short-lived. She always came back.

"If she would just go away and stay away," I told Margaret. "I could live with that. But this coming and going—here one day and gone the next—it's like burying Lazarus over and over again."

~~~~~

"Losing Language" is reprinted with permission from Caring For Mother, Westminster John Knox Press, 2007. The book is available at Amazon.

In a museum: to my granddaughters

2007-12-08T12:55:00.000-08:00

~ Dain Trafton

These are the forms a painter made
A father, a mother, a child
A broken wall and a distant town
Towards which a magpie flies alone,
Hay uncut in a level field.

These are the forms deeper than thought
That before all time, before dark and light,
God knew and in his knowing wrought:
The sharp-winged bird, the lonely town,
The wall undone, the field gone wild,
And redemption under a cracking sky,
A father, a mother, and a child.

No Other Way: Birding the Adirondacks

2007-12-05T20:11:00.000-08:00

~Alan Belford

Yells and screams proceeded us as we canoed up the Oswegatchie River, but we soon found the progress of our Ornithology class slowed by a low beaver dam blocking our way. There was only one place where the water was flowing deep enough to allow us to pass over it, and any deviation from a straight line through that small slot would land an aluminum canoe stuck—a predicament in which one of our boats found itself when we arrived. Two of the canoes had struggled their way across the dam and their occupants had turned to taunt their classmates, who were hoping they could avoid a lift-over and the subsequent wet feet.

My bowman Paul and I positioned our boat downstream where we could help fish anyone out who fell into the drink. The laughter and cheering insured that no one would do any birding until we had all undergone this rite of passage, anyway. Each boat’s attempt to cross over was a paddling frenzy of getting stuck, backing out and retrying, not gaining enough speed, and getting stuck again. All had to eventually push with their paddles and feet to get past and a couple came close to tipping when they became lodged at an awkward angle. One canoe tried again and again. Finally it became wedged and Andrea had no choice but to pull them out. I yelled words of caution amid the hoopla, but I was too late. The first steps from beaver dams are often doozies, and she was immediately in up to her chest--much to the enjoyment of her boisterous audience. Never losing her smile, she climbed back up the dam and pulled their canoe free.

Everyone was, of course, waiting for Paul and me—it’s every student’s dream to see their teacher dunked. But, although our boat was relatively heavy, Paul is a hulk of a human, who could probably break me over his knee if he chose, and we had no difficulty achieving the requisite speed. All I had to do was keep us pointed straight. We cruised up and over the dam with barely a break in our momentum, and Paul and I afforded ourselves a smirk and a nod at the misfortune of the disappointed onlookers. We then led the trip upstream into a world of rusty blackbirds and alder and olive-sided flycatchers.

Canoeing and getting wet are, in fact, good ways to avoid biting insects, a manifestation of true Adirondack love. Just a few days earlier, we had hiked at Streeter Lake on a sunny day that was quickly warming to buzz. We soon began stopping less to look for birds, because stopping exposed us to parties of mosquitoes and black flies overjoyed at the smorgasbord of fresh meat garnished with binoculars. And so our pace was necessarily brisk as we waved, fanned, slapped, and swatted, the air and ourselves in an almost maniacal manner.

We started jogging a few times to attempt some break from the bugs, and were giving up on birds altogether. But when the flutter of warblers caught my attention, I was reminded that this was an Ornithology class, after all, and we should probably look at something with feathers. I pointed to the birds and those with me turned to identify them. We never did. We were met by a Paparazzi of black flies swarming so dense at our heels that the birds vanished in their haze as if it was their defense tactic. “Okay, that’s it,” I choked on several of our assailants. They were in our faces, noses, and eyes, as if for that moment we were watching the world on some old, grainy television and nothing looked clear through the black dots. We double-timed it back to the vans.

Hiking through bogs can be an equally buggy business, and I watched our crew toxify their skin in the vain attempt to be stingy to our local chapter of Mosquitoes for a Better Tomorrow. Bugs or not, bogs are an excellent place to find boreal birds, and an Adirondack must. The boreal species are, after all, a reason many people come to the Daks to bird, since the ranges of many of these northern birds reach their southern limit in the Adirondacks, and birders come to see them there and avoid a longer trip further north into Canada. Walking along the old railroad bed that cuts through Massawepie Mire, the largest bog in the park, we did indeed feel as if we were in Canada—surrounded by open sunny bog mat, bordered on all sides by phalanxes of spruce trees and tamaracks. There on the shrubby bog Lincoln’s sparrows sang from hidden perches, while palm warblers hopped along low trees along the dirt road, incessantly bobbing their tail and rump in a comical, yet strangely mesmerizing rhythm. Magnolia and Nashville warblers sang from forested areas – each an explosion of mate-finding fervor somehow packed into an eight and a half gram body that had flown over two thousand miles from the tropics.

We saw the boreal specialty birds too: gray jays and black-backed woodpeckers, as well as both red and white-winged crossbills. Crossbill numbers in the Daks fluctuate widely from year to year, but were fairly high this past May. They have the unique ability to move their jaws side-to-side, allowing them to pry open tough cones to access the nutritious seeds where other birds can’t reach them. Since crossbills nest early in the year, we found family groups of both species with fledged young on several occasions - clustered at the tops of conifers, and pulling seeds from the green cones.

Some of our best views of their novel x-shaped bills came on top of Blue Mountain, where a large group of white-winged crossbills, comprised of several such families, moved in a wandering, almost aimless pattern on the sunny breeze, alighting here and taking off there.

We had hiked Blue Mountain for Bicknell’s thrush, a notoriously slippery bird to find, and a species of conservation concern across its range. Until recently, Bicknell’s was considered a subspecies of the gray-cheeked thrush, which breeds much farther north in Canada. Since Bicknell’s breed only on the fir-topped mountains of the northeast, their population is naturally scattered in small clusters across the landscape, and Blue Mountain is an excellent place to find them.

Thrush surveys are best conducted before day break when the birds sing the sun above the horizon and are easiest to count, but fearing a 4am hike in the dark would not create the positive vibe I wanted in the class, I opted for an hour more suitable to human happiness. And although our timing at the peak was not optimal to find the thrush, the beautiful day had our spirits high. Some bird activity soon had several of us off the trail, working along the edge of a blow-down, kept from going far by the impassable maze of fallen trees and branches criss-crossing each other in our path. We were balancing precariously on these logs to gain a better view when we spotted what we thought was a thrush fly low and disappear. Only Paul saw where it had landed. Unable to get to his vantage point, he had to be our eyes. “I can’t see the front of it,” he began. “But its tail looks redder than its back.” “It should,” I replied and like that the bird was gone. Hardly a look at its butt-end. Bicknell’s are skulkers.

While waiting for a reappearance of this mysterious bird, a sudden outburst of Bicknell’s chatter from the nearby trail sent us tripping along our balance beams as fast as we could. There were several of them this time. We divided forces and spread out for angles to peer into the balsam-laden gloom. My brother – an excellent birder who came up from Philadelphia for such Adirondack birds – and Paul stayed down trail, and I a few others spread up the trail recruiting a few other class members who had given up on our initial pursuit along the Pick-up-Stick forest.

The birds called again, a fluty buzz just off the trail behind a vale of green balsam needles. We crept closer from each side – wary to frighten them as they bickered in thrush talk in the darkness – we used hand gestures to communicate. The calls came again – almost directly on our left – we could hear the needles moving and getting kicked by the birds. Then another bird called on our right. We were right in the middle of them, the pinchers closing between our two parties in a flanking maneuver that would have made Stonewall Jackson proud. We had them.

I was on my toes, neck straining, holding my binoculars just below my face for instant use. My ears were tuned to the softest sounds, and my eyes were catching every movement, making me flinch at each small flying insect. It’s the birdwatching equivalent of a cat about to pounce. I saw the shuffle of thrush feet, hopping near the base of the trees. I heard the flutter of thrush wings. The balsam nodded and twitched. The birds were moving right behind that branch. I could hear them moving right behind that trunk. They were right, right, in that shadow. They were just out of sight. They were right, just…silent. Still. Gone. Vanished into those uncanningly frustrating places birds go when they want to make birders feel humble. Our bodies relaxed in disappointment.

We waited around the peak, hoping to hear them again, but we did not. And we waited some more, eating an early lunch while waving away a growing contingent of black flies in the warming sun. Finally we had to go. It was too late for Bicknell’s and our brief glances had to suffice. Back down the trail we went, stopping again at the small tree cavity where the boreal chickadees were flitting to and fro in a frenzy of almost silent activity – perhaps the highlight of our day.

Before we had left the peak, Paul grabbed a stone and scratched “Darn Thrush” on the bare rock face beneath the fire tower that marked the summit, echoing the sentiments of the rest of us, and the feeling that all birders have felt at one time or another. Birds are wonderful, but sometimes you just want to kill them. They don’t always let themselves be seen like me and my egotistic, anthropocentric view on life think they should. After all, it’s easy to want to see them all. Birding is truly addicting, and an Ornithology class is a little like one addict leading others astray into a life of dependency.

The students had bought what I was selling, and had fixed their eyes on the species record of my previous class who themselves had hoped to put their list out of the reach of others. That proved not to be the case on our final evening, when we eclipsed the record by one species, due in large part to an immature great horned owl sitting on a telephone wire - granting Tim big-time props for spotting it.

But it’s not the competition that drives this addiction. Bird watching ushers us into an array of shapes, songs, sizes, behaviors, and patterns that speak of a creative power far beyond our own. The sheer variety—perhaps initially frustrating for my students—draw us into the colorful weave of a world which makes us stand back in awe, all the while fine-tuning our senses to notice the seemingly insignificant parts of the world we’ve often overlooked.

That’s why the class jumped around excitedly pointing to direct me to where their first scarlet tanager perched, wanting to know what this alarmingly red bird was. It’s why we sat and laughed at the incessant and brazen calling of the Virginia rail who came to protest the claims our tape player was making on his territory. Loudly patrolling the edge of the reeds with his pumping calls, he copulated multiple times with his mate to make sure we fully understood that both this swath of marsh and his mate were his and his alone.

It’s why we all abruptly stopped as we walked across a field when we stumbled upon an American bittern far from its camouflaging cattails. The large bird stood with its bill pointed directly at the sky, in an attempt to be a motionless reed, while watching us with its bright yellow eyes. It subtly shifted its feet, keeping its nose straight in the air, until it was eventually facing away from us, and then with several great flaps, rose and wheeled with a hoarse croak towards the safety of the neighboring marsh.

And it’s why we watched transfixed as a mother woodcock fluttered about as with a broken wing to distract us while her downy fluffs of chicks scrambled on tiny, newly-hatched legs to cover. She twittered in the open, drawing us to herself, until, deeming her chicks safe, ceased her charade and flew to shelter.

It is the rhythm and richness to this sort of discovery that trumps any string of names or record number of species. It is waking early, spending hours in the field, and hearing bird calls played throughout the campus lodge and dorms. It is a privileged immersion into another world, joining in an exuberance of life that only a hormone-driven Virginia rail could possess, praising its Creator with joyous outbursts of territoriality.

And so perhaps this is an addiction to life, to what screams at us from the marshes, forests, and hills on all sides in glorious praise and an inexorable call to join the celebration. And so we fight clouds of insects, surmount beaver dams, and climb mountains, all for a chance to be poised motionless in muscle-tensed anticipation for the chance to see a…a…it could be a...”Aw no! A black fly just flew in my eye!” And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

From: Introducing Paloma

2007-12-05T20:06:00.000-08:00

~Emilie Griffin

Justin Harris decided on an all-night vigil. He would wait until midnight; surely by then everybody would have deserted the deck. He would go out and pray under the stars. Now he had something special to pray for: the soul of Paloma Weaver. She was so good, he explained to the Lord. And clearly, she had some heavy sin on her conscience. "If only I were already a priest, I could hear her confession. I could give her the forgiveness you desire, Lord. But as things stand, being only a candidate for your priesthood, I am unable to help her. Except by being, possibly, an occasion of grace."
Justin said all this while he was still inside the cabin. Later on, under the stars, he would really open up.
"Of course, she is not a Catholic, Lord, but being an Episcopalian is very close." Justin Harris was somewhat hazy on church history. He knew there had been some unpleasantness between England and Rome, but it was so long ago. And far away. Surely the Lord must consider Paloma to be in a state of grace. "Lord, you will surely overlook the inconvenient fact that she is a Protestant and gather her into your flaming, tender heart."
One thing was clear to him. Jesus was all-powerful. If Jesus wanted to, he could enter into Paloma's fallen condition and snap the bonds of sin that were entrapping her. She could be released from the prison of any transgression large or small. He, Justin Harris, could not accomplish this. But the Lord Jesus could surely arrange it.
Minutes passed slowly. They inched. They slowed to a standstill. But in spite of that, bells sounded as each half hour went by.
Eight bells at last. Midnight. Justin went out on deck. A fine spray scattered through the railings. Stars and planets soared overhead. Were those constellations? He could name just a few. Ursa Minor, the little bear. Ursa Major, the great bear. Easy enough. He would have to look up the rest. Maybe Paloma knew them. No wonder the ancients thought their gods lived above, in total splendor.
"God, you are completely remarkable," Justin said.
God, who had created all this, could certainly save lovely Paloma Weaver. "Please look kindly on her, Lord. She is misguided in some way. Maybe this fellow Art McGee has misled her. Forgive her and make her whole again."
After Justin had poured out his concerns, he decided to let Jesus talk awhile.
Jesus was very firm. "She belongs to me, Justin, not to you," Jesus said. It hurt Justin to hear it, but he knew Jesus was right. "Your will, Lord, not mine," he said after a while.

* * * * * *

When she fell asleep--she did not know how long she had been sleeping--Paloma had a dream. She was deep underwater on the ocean floor, held down by terrible weights, metal weights like the ones on the doctor's scales. Those weights were her sins; they would hold her down forever, way under the surface of the waves. Paloma was afraid she would find the body of Logan Gray drifting along the ocean floor. But no; it was all mollusks and seaweed and corals. The place was curious: valleys and ridges and long prehistoric-looking fish glowing with luminescence; when they darted away it was desolate, silent and hostile and dark.
She bobbed along on the ocean floor. After awhile she came to an underwater church, doors and windows open to the flowing deep-sea currents. Inside was Jesus, nailed to the cross. Blood trailed from his body into the currents flowing past.
Jesus again! She couldn't get away from him. Even on the ocean floor, Jesus was there.

* * * * * *

Eight bells. Four a.m. Paloma woke with a start and her mother kept on sleeping. "Every time I dream it is either about water, or about Jesus, or both," Paloma thought. The little cabin was completely dark. Where were they? She snapped the porthole open but saw nothing.
She dressed quickly and headed into the passageway, up the metal stairs, out on deck. Oh, the wind was cool.
She hoped she would find Justin Harris and return his book. And yes, he was right there.
"I prayed for you," he said.
"Prayed for me to come out here?"
"Prayed for God to take care of you."
"I believe in other gods. Gods of the deep."
"What gods?"
"You know, Neptune, Poseidon, Proteus. Under the waves."
"Really? You're a pagan?"
"Oh, I'm not sure about that. I don't know what I am."
Justin wasn't really shocked. He was interested. The anthropologist took over while the Jesuit caught his breath.
"After I read your beautiful poem I felt sure of it. Your gods, the horses of the sun, were once alive, but now they are dead. And the universe is empty, lonely, the Greek gods and goddesses who once inhabited the solar system are not real, they don't exist, and you have no God to comfort you."
But Paloma was slightly offended at being called a pagan. It really didn't seem fair.
"Didn't I notice, when we were in Honduras," Paloma went on, "you can be a pagan and a Christian at the same time?"
"Are you baptized?" Justin knew it was rude to ask but he simply had to know.
"Oh, probably. But don't I have to believe in Jesus, too?"
"I'll keep on praying."
"Please do."
They stood together, looking out into the dark.
Paloma felt exalted. She had exerted such power over him, the power of her words on a page. Her soul had spoken to him, and he was deeply moved.
After a while Justin asked, "Are you in love with him?"
"Art?"
"He follows you everywhere. Lights your cigarettes. Gets nervous when I take up your time."
"Maybe he does care. I'm not sure."
"But do you care?"
"I want to be in love. Someone is supposed to come along and sweep me off my feet."
"Like the movies?"
"Yes."
His heart was aching. He thought he could feel the passion of her heart aching, too. This beautiful young woman with the soul of a poet longed to be comforted, but he, Justin, wasn't fully able to take on the challenge. Yet he loved her, he was sure of it. Their souls were linked somehow, and they stood together in the dark like twin constellations.
Then they heard something, way down at the water's edge. A small vessel was approaching them in the dark.
Next came a kind of commotion as someone climbed up a ladder, over the side.
Just then the first officer, Mr. O'Malley, turned up
"It's the bar pilot," O'Malley explained. "We need him to get us in."
"Are we that close to the mouth of the river?"
"Getting pretty close."

* * * * *

"Does your mother know you're out here?" Justin said. "Will she disapprove?"
"She disapproves of you, any time of night or day," Paloma said. "She doesn't know what we talk about."
More silence. Then.
"I had a bad dream. Jesus under the waves."
"Wasn't that a good dream? Jesus riding a porpoise, like Proteus coming over the foam?"
"Always changing shape and form," Paloma said.
She could feel the voyage ending, time closing in. Everything would soon be over. She stood at the railing and stared into the dark, waiting for some sign of a shore. How long did she stand there?
Justin had gone, maybe she hadn't heard him say goodbye. She was alone in the dark, and the water was rushing against the hull.
Then she could see the outline of trees, small crabby trees, and the light coming behind them, rosy-fingered dawn.
Deep horns blew, and other horns answered them, and Paloma was suddenly praying.
Praying they wouldn't run aground. Praying that barges wouldn't collide, that ships wouldn't sink and the end of the world would hold off for a while.
Jesus, she prayed. Jesus. She amazed herself. She said the name again. Help me to know what love is, she said.
She found herself thinking about brown eyes.
Art McGee, who wasn’t studying for the priesthood, had brown eyes. He was earthy enough.
He did not have sea-green eyes, and his eyelashes were not mystical.
His look was not far away. He met your gaze.
He was so unholy. She wanted that.
Hymen was the god of marriage, but Hymen was broken.
With her left hand, she felt for her great-grandmother's emerald ring, still on her hand, and was glad she had not sacrificed it to the gods of the deep.
Now she could really see the trees in silhouette.
Oh, yes.
She could make out the trees on either bank of the river, and the light was coming up strong. They were going up river; there were bends in the river and though the light was coming brighter and brighter she could not see ahead.

"For Such a Time as This:" A Forum on Women Writing

2007-12-05T19:53:00.000-08:00

Organized around the theme selected for the inauguration of Shirley Mullen as the fifth president of Houghton College, “For Such a Time as This,” the 2007 Writing Festival featured three women writers: Susanna Childress, Jean Janzen, and Leslie Leyland Fields. Susanna Childress, who currently teaches at Hope College, is the author of Jagged with Love, a collection of poems selected by Billie Collins for the Brittingham Poetry Prize. Jean Janzen is a winner of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The most recent of her many books are Piano in the Vineyard (poems) and Elements of Faithful Writing (essays). Leslie Leyland Fields, professor of creative nonfiction in the Seattle Pacific MFA program has published five books including Surviving the Island of Grace and Surprise Child. During the last session of the festival, the three gathered to discuss their writing, the challenges of their professional lives and the connections between faith and gender. The session was moderated by Houghton writing faculty member Lori Huth, who teaches fiction and screenwriting.

Huth: I’m hoping that the questions can be a springboard for you to go ahead and talk in whatever direction you want. First, I was curious to find out what you think it means to be a woman writer, and does that qualifier “woman writer” seem significant to you still? Or, another way of putting this is, does the label “woman writer” pigeon hole you? Does it free you somehow? Or do you think that this is an irrelevant qualifier that we no longer need?
Audience Laughter
Huth: Someone has to be first.
Leyland-Fields: I remember, I was giving a reading and I was introduced as a poetess—
Audience: Ooooo…
Leyland-Fields: That’s what we do. We say women writers. Do we ever say “men writers”? We never put gender for men in front of writers. So there’s part of me that really does object to that.
Janzen: I had never really thought about it, until I was elevated to pioneer by a woman I respect deeply. And there I was going, “yes, I somehow had the vision to write and I was a woman.” I think the strangeness of that has lessened and I’m glad. It’s a relief. There is a sort of comfort with being just a writer. But I think the fact that we are three women speaking about this has some value.
Childress: Well, I’m just barely a woman, so…
Audience laughter
Leyland-Fields: There’re a lot of ways to interpret that.
Audience laughter
Childress: I’m a girl writer—um, no, no…I was about to quote Britney Spears, but no, no, that’s ridiculous.
I don’t know that I’ve ever been referred to as a “woman writer,” but I know that my work seems, at least to me, markedly feminine; and I don’t know how to express that. So that poses a problem in terms of how we offer characteristics of women’s writing or qualify our writing. I’m working from a woman’s body and a woman’s point of view. So how can that perspective not give my writing a particular slant?
I think at this point we don’t have to be like Anne Bradstreet, who had to defend herself and say, “Some would say my hand a needle better fits” or something like that. We don’t have to defend ourselves in that way. It’s an equal opportunity world and we can be writers if we want to be writers. At the same time, I think career, motherhood, attention and energy, are issues that I don’t know that men face in the same way. So, I think being qualified as a woman writer then complicates what it is that I do and how I go about doing it.
Then again, I really don’t like books like Marge Piercy’s The Moon is Always Female, or I only like certain parts of those books. Peircy’s was written back in the seventies when women were writing these really strong pro-woman, feminist poetry, these sort of books that are about sort of metawriting, like I’m writing about being a woman writing. In the seventies that probably worked. That was the issue at the time. But I no longer feel as though women need to be metawriting.
Huth: Well that’s actually a really good segue into my next question. You’ve identified that we’re no longer in the position that Anne Bradstreet was in our attitude toward gender. But do you think that the goals of the feminist movement have been achieved? In other words, do you think that we, as women writers, are as respected? Is there parity in terms of publication and access to readers and so on?
Leyland-Fields: I’ve never thought about parity in publication. I would hope that a publishing house never says, “Okay we’ve got to get fifty percent men—no, actually, let’s get the percentage of men writers to match the percentage of our population.” I don’t know. I guess that I am so confident in women’s ability to write as well as men that we don’t need any sort of quota for women writers.
Janzen: I would say – I couldn’t prove it – but I sense that there is still a kind of “old boy” connection about publishing, especially the big houses…
Childress: And with poet laureates…
Janzen: Yes, so I think that we have not broken the glass ceiling really. There is still a club.
Childress: Oh yeah.
Leyland-Fields: But, you know within the Christian Booksellers Association, 85 percent of the book buyers are women. So as a woman in that marketplace, you know you’re definitely at an advantage. I don’t know the specifics within the ABA, but I do know that the majority of the book buyers are women. Women read more then men.
Childress: Talking from my sub-category of poetry, which is what I know best in terms of movements and whatever else: it has been a male world. You’re very hard pressed to find women modernist poets.
Who are they? Marianne Moore. Gertrude Stein too, if you count her work as poetry. Okay, there’s two. Then you keep going and here comes Anne Sexton and here comes Sylvia Plath. And wow, were they volcanoes of women. And now we’ve sort of got the post-confessional and language movements, which are by and large feminist driven movements. There are so many women writers who are respected and it’s a really wonderful thing but the old white men are still the poet laureates. I’m a little weary of it.
Why haven’t they chosen some vivacious young or old woman to be the face of poetry for the United States?
Janzen: To be fair, we need to mention Rita Dove.
Childress: That’s true.
Leyland-Fields: That was a number of years ago.
Janzen: I was celebrating my sixtieth birthday in New York City and she read at St. John with four Nobel prize winning poets. This was done for my birthday, of course.
Audience laughter.
Janzen: It was the most magnificent event.
Huth: Yesterday, Jean, you talked about a writing passage that you had done that was sensual and, at the time, seemed bold. You made a joke about how that would be mild for Susanna to write about. And so my question is, what’s behind that joke? What do you think has changed in writing generally, or for women writers in particular, in terms of subjects that you can and can’t approach? Is there any sense of taboo?
Leyland-Fields: Well, Susanna and I had a conversation this morning right after chapel. She said she was dying to write a tampon poem.
Childress: That’s true.
Leyland-Fields: And I told her, well I just wrote two essays with tampons in them. And I recognize that there are boundaries. I write creative nonfiction, so that means that I am writing from my life, from lived experience and obviously that means my net is cast around those I live with. So my boundaries have to do more with family and a lot less to do with sex or with gender issues. So I don’t feel any constraint about talking about tampons or having your period or woman things of the body. I don’t feel a restraint and that’s part of what I think is our call as Christians. But okay, not every woman wants to go out and read a tampon poem.
Audience laughter.
Leyland-Fields: I think it goes back to the seventies when the domestic suddenly was legitimate literary territory. That was revolutionary; and so I want to absolutely defend the domestic, the right to write about laundry, to write about all these things. But at the same time, I was just reading on the internet the other day an essay complaining that too many women writers are confining themselves to the domestic. There’s too much chick lit.
Childress: For the record, I despise chick lit. I think it’s embarrassing.
Huth: Could one of you sort of define, or just summarize in your view, what chick lit is, so we know what you’re talking about?
Leyland-Fields: Okay, let’s see if I can be a little more objective. I would say it started maybe with Bridget Jones’ Diary. It was considered the first exploration of the single woman in the city, the angst of the single woman. And you know, it’s really interesting how trends start, and the minute one book is popular, everybody jumps on and says, “Oh I want a piece of that.” And so it created this whole movement of literature about mostly single women in careers. And now, as the chicks got married and had little chicks of their own, that gave birth to mommy-lit. Okay, you can add the vitriol now…
Childress: I’m just tired of this sort of high-heeled, New York girl - you can put another adjective in there - that is all about her pillow-booking and her sexual exploits and how she’s just as manipulative and cruel as a man. Why would we ever want to live up to that? Come on, women! And I just get so sick of it when I walk through the book store and see it filled with these novels. And there are even stickers on the books now that say “chick lit.” Come on…
But there was something else that I wanted to say. What was the original question?
Huth: It was about, are there things that are taboo still…
Childress: Yes. What is so interesting, is that I’m now having a harder time being honest about my family members and about relational experiences. I never believed my first book of poetry would be published. I never sat down to write thinking, “My dad’s going to see this or my mom’s going to read this or my aunts and uncles are going to read this.” I just was sort of writing. What’s funny is that, for those of you who were at my reading last night, and I hope I can be so bold as to say this, I wrote about sex before I had it, before I was getting any, and now that I am married, my husband has forbid me to write about it until he was dead. And so that is a self-imposed taboo. And so I’m trying to find other ways to talk about our life and intimacy and the weird, strange things of being married. Yeah, there are still some taboos.
Huth: Do you want to add anything, Jean?
Janzen: Well, this is probably already understood but it would relate to what you just said so I’m going to add it. I wouldn’t have written about my grandmother’s suicide until my father died. I learned about it the day after he died, so I couldn’t have, but if I had known I still wouldn’t have written it. It was such a sorrow he could not talk about it, and I didn’t know if I would ever publish it, until my very conservative cousin said to me, “Finally, someone has to tell the story.”
So, in some ways, I think we need to respect how people, family members especially, might respond to what we write.
Huth: It’s interesting because it seems like most of you are suggesting that the taboos you sense are more in your relationships and responsibilities than some kind of social pressure, which leads a little bit into my next question.
Maybe the other two of you will disagree with this, but, Jean, you mentioned yesterday that writing is an isolated or isolating task and that caused me to sort of wonder, how have you felt this isolation? Do you feel like this isolation as a writer effects your relationships, especially the relationships you have as a woman out of which you are expected to do a lot of nurturing and caring; you know, as the daughter, as the mother, as the wife? Is there a tension between those responsibilities?
Childress: I’ve been single for most of my life, and there’ve been very few constraints as to when I could or couldn’t write: however, I would agree that it’s both an isolated and isolating process or experience. But I am so blessed that I married an artist and my husband is my very first reader and so for me there’s this sense of immediate community.
Janzen: And you’ve been in a graduate program with other writers. Graduate school, for me, was a time period that was slim because I would take two classes at a time and then go back home. I was not in a dorm or in student activities. That was isolating. I did have the class, but even there it was somewhat limited for me.
Leyland-Fields: I think the isolation is not… I mean, yeah, it’s partly going off to be alone and quiet most of the time when you’re working. You go into the room, close the door, and close everybody out.
But I’ve found that there’s a deeper kind of isolation in writing and maybe it’s what leads writers to write in the first place and that is that you do feel alone. You feel profoundly isolated. And I think that’s the truth; I think we are all alone and very separate from one another and I think maybe the writer feels that most of all and sees that most of all. And the writing is a way of entering into that and a way of remedying that by writing yourself back into the web of people and relationships and family.
So that sense of isolation, I think, is at the core of being a writer. And I think people need to not run from it. If someone says, “I’m so lonely,” I would say, “I understand.” We are lonely, because we are still, in some ways, separated from God and we will not ever be fully whole until we are back with Him in body and in spirit. And in the mean time, loneliness and isolation is part of what it means to live in this world. It’s that very loneliness that compels us to find and create community. But even that community will not fully assuage our apartness from God and one another in this world.
Janzen: That is a beautiful segue for me in that my emerging manuscript which is almost finished, is really about the very different ways God is present in my life. And I think I didn’t even recognize that writing, and the loneliness that drove me to write, is what brought me the possibility to know it.
We should all go pray and be with God, but that sort of forced isolation of writing allowed me to be able to even find some language for it; I hope. Some of you will be reading Paper House and you will find it’s there. And so, it’s really a wonderful pay off for loneliness, because ultimately then, as you’d say, you’re not alone, ever.
Childress: Joseph Conrad said, in Heart of Darkness, that we live as we dream: alone. And when I stumbled upon that quote in undergrad, it was really important to me because I’ve always felt a supreme sense of isolation from my peers. I just felt misunderstood—not avant garde, cool, boheme, kind of misunderstood, but more like people just didn’t quite get me or I didn’t feel like I was connecting fully with them. And I wanted to be known so much.
I was finally able to make a distinction that doesn’t make sense linguistically but makes sense for me conceptually; that my life is not a lonely experience but it is an alone experience. And I don’t know if that makes sense, but somehow it works for me.
Janzen: That’s a better term; that’s what I should have used yesterday, really, it is. And I think we do feel that way. Some of you who are writing, and almost couldn’t know if you’re going to keep writing, find yourself watching what people do and hearing what they say and wondering, “why do people think that’s important?” Sometimes you know there’s something bigger, better, deeper. And you ask yourself, “Does anybody else feel that?”
Does that make us seem arrogant? I hope not.

You Are Our World: A Journal

2007-12-05T19:46:00.000-08:00

~ Tineke Hegeman

I Begin to Lose the Rain

When I was a child I longed for the rain. When I became a woman I wished this childish way were not behind me. I wanted to want the rain.

We had just three seasons in Northern Benin, “dry season,” or “Harmattan,” named after the scorching Harmattan winds that fled off the Sahara desert, “hot season”—no further explanation needed— and “rainy season.” During the two rainless seasons, I longed. Longed with the brittle yellow grasses that cracked and collapsed in the dryness and heat, longed with the fissured mud, dried to a thick clay cake on the bottom of what had once been a pond or a swamp. Longed with the empty, empty skies that stretched on and on in their mindless, unconscious search for mist and cloud. Longed with the fields that felt drab and constrained without red and green and yellow. All they owned for embellishment were tiny, bright pink flowers that looked like far-off stars and whose pinkness faded with the rise of the seasons of the sun. To pick the last of these dry-season flowers was to remember that fields were made for flowers – for celebration and colour. And these were the only witnesses –puny and watered down.

Sometime during high school I began to realise I no longer waited for the first rains as I used to when a child. I still wanted rainy season to come, but not with the same intensity. This alarmed me and I remember writing You about it a few times, over the years. The fear returned every April or so – when the first “mango rain” could be legitimately hoped for. (Why did we call the first, fierce rain a “mango rain”? Not liking mangoes, I never cared.)

On one occasion when this was bothering me I realised an obvious fact: the emotional connection I once had as a child with the seasons, the rain, the wind, I now had with You. There was a relationship between my loss and my treasure, for while I struggled to let go of my childhood relationship to the world around me, I could feel Your hands, like a parent’s, gently prying open the fingers of my heart. What I held there, so tightly, was a flower I had picked, and in the sweaty press of my eager fist, it has been crushed. It was as though You said to me, Don’t hold on to the flower, because if you hold on, it will die. Look at the Living Flower; and You led me to Your Garden, where every flower grows. It was as though You said to me, Feel, and so I placed my fingers around the stem of the Flower, and stood there a long time, realising: Perhaps I can live with the pain of losing the flower, losing the rain, because now I am in an Eternal Garden, and here the Rain and the Flowers never pass away.

Revelation is often characterised by a sense of unusual clarity and wholeness, of consolation in one’s deepest losses. Standing there in the Eternal Garden, with my fingers reverently feeling the Life of the Living Flower, I knew that I had something much better in You than in the clutch of my hands, so grimy with the desperation and ignorance of my childish love. I was learning, under the watchful gentleness of the Gardener and Father, how to love the world in a way that gave, instead of taking, Life. And in my learning, I have come to claim this about my sensory experience of the world: that it is astoundingly valuable, because it can be transformed, and can, in turn, transform.

How I Met the Rain

I met an African rainstorm the first night my family stayed in the mission house at the Baatonu Bible School. I was five years old. I remember with a kind of stark emotional power the frightened bewilderment of beholding heavy wooden levers in the bedroom windows, and how, right on the heels of making this alarming discovery in that empty, dimly luminous room, the rain came down in a thunderous, unapologetic torrent. The fierceness of the wind, the unidentifiable noise – I screamed and ran for Mummy. If I had been made aware of Your soon return, I am sure I would have concluded that the end of the world had come.

This was Rain. Rain on a tin roof. As soon as I understood what was happening, I gave away my heart. From that night forth, the house became the House of the Rain – the House in which I woke up the next morning to Papa’s wide-eyed telling of the damage our first monster rain had done. Tearing up the translucent plastic panels on our water heater – there is no way to describe this wonderful, unique contraption – the rain-heavy wind had scattered the panels across all the surrounding fields and bush. While I slept, Papa had been out retrieving them from far and wide. To my five-year-old mind, the power this rain-wind possessed was unimaginable – a power I had never met before.

As we settled into the house and our new life – the life that became mine and can be claimed by so few white women – the rain seemed to settle into my soul. I was no longer terrified, but I now could experience a lovely, tremulous kind of awe. I could cuddle up with my little sister under blankets as our small, sweaty bodies registered odd, African drops in temperature – I could sing and shiver along with the wind. I could run out into the storm, drowning my bare feet in the cold, cold waters of impromptu rivers spattering through the clearing around the house, and run with them, over tree roots, skirting my Dutch father’s attempts at dirt dikes around the front porch, and dash joyously into pooling puddles. And with a peaked tin roof, the rain came streaming down on two sides of the house, creating hundreds of singular shower spouts. Around and around the house I would run, laughing with happiness, having intense, driven water splash the hair on my head smoother and flatter than smooth and flat.

I love You. Why is there a connection between these memories and this love? That is what I want to know.

The Rain Here is not the Same

It has been raining all day. As evening falls, glistening in the puddles and dripping down through the chilled air, I watch a reflection of myself in my window panes. Whenever I look up from this computer screen, I catch soft happiness in the shining eyes that look back at me.

Why should I be so happy and peace-filled?

I never know quite what to make of rain here in North America. A week or so ago, there was a big thunderstorm during the night. When I woke up, groggily, to the sounds of the wind and thunder, it wasn’t easy to determine whether it felt bizarre or familiar. It was strange because we so seldom have significant storms here in Houghton, but it was not disconcerting or frightening; I was filled with happiness –with comfort. Curling the quilt into my fingers, and sinking into the smooth cold of the pillow, I experienced sweetness as I fell back asleep.

The following day people were talking about the rainstorm. I was slightly surprised they had felt alarmed – had gotten up out of bed to anxiously watch and consider, shutting windows and wondering nervously at the lightning. I tried to make sympathetic conversation, and pitied them in their loss of sleep.

But those moments of awareness, between the sheets of life and dream, had perhaps been the sweetest of my week. The storm had connected to the deep part of my being – to the place that is reserved for only the most intimate, natural things. The Tineke of Rain and of Africa and of Beautiful Things had come up for breath. How many times before had I awoken to the deep mercy of rain in the night? How many times before had I snuggled down into blankets suddenly quilted into bliss? So many times. So many times. Though not so many times here in North America.

Rain here at Houghton does give me happiness, and when I come in from the wet and warm up in blankets and slippers, I feel much as I have felt in Africa before. But rain here can’t help but bother a person as well, even a person used to disarming unpleasant things by embracing them with unreasonable peace and love. Compared to the wild and musical rain of home, rain in Houghton seems so tame, so limpid. If the rain here could speak, it would drawl weakly. In Africa it would lilt, almost sing. But, disappointed as I am, I try my best to listen, as I would try to enjoy a dreary public speaker. Sometimes, by my determination to find happiness and good in everything, I remind myself, and not without embarrassment, of Pollyanna.

Or Thomas a Kempis.

Thomas a Kempis has crept into my soul while I was unawares, I think. One should learn to be careful about meditating on books with difficult counsel. No matter how hopelessly you give yourself up as a lost cause where any particular spiritual life pattern is concerned, afterward you find that you have absorbed and changed more than you would have thought. This is not the first time that I’ve recognised à Kempis quietly praying in the shadows of my thoughts – telling me calmly that if I love the rain it will no longer hurt me.

But in the frankness of my unspoken thoughts and in the animation of my hidden facial expressions, I honestly can’t love North American rain the way I love rain at home. Not even when I remember to use an umbrella.

A Poem

Perhaps it is not fair to put the change in my feelings down to the difference between rain in Africa and rain in America. Too simple. It is, after all, fairly consistently observed that a child experiences life differently than an adult. A child seems to experience, more directly than an adult, the natural world and its relationships. A child receives openly, instead of first analysing and deliberating, suspecting and judging. A child does not choose to enter into rain, he enters it instinctively as soon as he hears the wind mustering up its strength in the distance. Pinching his nose against the sudden sting of its in-rushing perfume, he runs into the open field to spot the dark clouds and sound the alarm. He does not quickly look back down at his textbook, checking his email account in case a message came in while he glanced out the window, forgetting himself enough to dream.

I’ve been remembering a poem I read once, by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Spring and Fall: to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

There is a very real sense in which my grieving for the loss of the rain was a grieving for myself—a recognition that my Enemy, as I fought against the aging of my soul, was Death, and that I shared this Enemy with the flowers, the grasses, the bullfrogs that sang so feelingly, the cicadas that refused to surrender silently to the oppression of heat.

Hopkins was wise. Perhaps I do not cry bitterly anymore when a storm comes and goes and I have had no arms in my heart to embrace it—when the leaves of Goldengrove “leafmeal lie”— but “I do weep and know why.” I know my Rain, and will not bear to lose Him. For Him I will weep. For He, I with my thoughts ever fresh with love, can care for.

It occurred to me the other day when I was looking out of a second storey window on a beautiful view, that there is a sense in which, at this stage of my life, I am content not to feel the beauty of nature as keenly as I might. I have already established to myself, and also to others, that I have a relationship to the world I live in – a relationship that while not always emotional, does involve my emotions, and that while constant and unconscious on a basic level, is yet able to be intentionally and uniquely experienced on another. There was a time in my life when it was incredibly important to identify and experience a relationship with the world. Somehow I knew that this was part of who I was, and there was a strange sense of apprehension – as though if I didn’t claim this part, I would lose something vital.

But that day, I felt at rest in the world, with nothing to prove and nothing to fear.

I wondered why.

Well, maybe, I have the true Rain now. I passed through the rain showers; I wailed with the looking wind; and finally, I came to the end of that country, to find that the new country before me was just the same as that I had passed through before, only transformed by the unimaginable beauty of the One it actually was. And maybe, if I had not claimed the part of me that had a relationship to the wind and to the rain, I would not have found this Country quite as lovely, wild, and eternally good as I have discovered it to be.

How I Loved the Wind

I remember the way I used to feel about the wind too.

In my twenties I am a bit embarrassed of how passionately and unashamedly I used to love the wind. One of the most useless, sentimental poems I ever wrote was dedicated to the wind…I had been reading nothing but Shelley and Keats without having a tenth of their skill and instinct, and the results were terrible.

But in my isolation as a thirteen-year-old “bush MK” transplanted into a small, considerably WASP town in Ontario, and in my frequent emotional escapes to the unreal land of L.M. Montgomery, I sometimes thought that only the wind understood how I felt – that only in the blowing wind did my soul have an opportunity to try its bitter, sweet voice. And though there was an element of immaturity, as well as of idolatry in the vehemence of my attachment to wind at that awkward time of my life, I still love the wind now. So I want to remember.

I want to remember the slow, wet walks along the African beach with the wind piping strains sandy with rough salt pain, and sitting in the beach cabins, eating French baguette sandwiches with the sticky ocean breeze getting tangled in my hair.

I want to remember the sad twilit gusts that blew over the poor, dried-out African brushland, and pressed sweaty palms to my forehead in a ritual gesture of blessing. If they did not leave moist, dirty coins stuck to my skin, they left me with the truer gift of consolation.

I want to remember how frightened my sister was that same year we were in Canada, when a blizzard wind ranted and raged down the furnace pipe during the night -- yet how enchanted I was. The small furnace room she and I shared for a bedroom was the quirkiest, unhappiest place. Three doorways, no windows – there was only one way to arrange the room, and this drove me crazy. And when I wanted the door open a crack, she wanted it closed. The impossibility of the room equaled the impossibility of my confusing life. Yet when the Wind enveloped my Room with its harshly lovely song, the darkness over the surface of my deep lifted, and my formless and empty earth felt the gentle disturbance of hovering wings.

I want to remember all of these beginnings of divine intimacy, every moment of my Genesis.

I want to remember how brave and creative I suddenly feel when the wind rises – like I really could dance if I were only sure of being entirely alone – as though I really could be a saint, a poet, a beautiful person – like I really could be one with You.

Permit Me Some Ecstasy

I paged through a book about Jackie Kennedy Onassis while eating lunch today. On the last page was a poem, one of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s that I had never read before, called “Memory of Cape Cod” – apparently one of Jackie’s favourite poems. It reminded me of my voice -- my inside voice—when I have stood underneath wind-played firs and thought of the sea:

The wind in the ash-tree sounds like surf on the shore at Truro.

I will shut my eyes…

...

Let me listen to the wind in the ash… it sounds like surf on the shore.

Yes. And the shore is quite wonderful, because You are the Sea.

Your voice

Is like the humming of the forest.

The dark green waves and billows

Slowly and carefully sing

The mood of the gentle breeze.

These are Jane Chong’s words in “Your Voice.” She was remembering the voice of the lover who abandoned her. I am remembering the voice of the Lover who is always here and never ceases to speak.

Sacramental Theology

Last night at our college worship service we sang the hymn, “This is my Father’s World.”

In the rustling grass

I hear Him pass.

I see Him everywhere.

Once, while conferencing with Professor Leax, he quoted this verse, marveling quietly at how unsuspecting many Christians are when they open a hymn book. Do they realise what they are giving credence to by singing these words? “In the rustling grass I hear Him pass…” This is sacramental theology – the belief that the beauty of the universe is a sacrament – a holy image – of God.

When I look up “sacrament” in The Oxford English Dictionary, it tells me that “sacrament” is “the common name for certain solemn ceremonies or religious acts belonging to the institutions of the Christian church.” Not all Christians agree on the number and nature of sacraments. Generally, Protestants recognise two: Baptism, and the Eucharist, because these are the only two that they understand to be directly commanded by Jesus. Catholics add Confirmation, Penance, Extreme Unction, taking Holy Orders and Matrimony, to make seven.

There is also a wider application of the word, however, as “something likened to the recognized sacraments.” It explains that when the term ‘sacrament’ is used for things other than the seven recognised Christian sacraments it is when they have “a sacred character or function,” and seem to be “a sacred seal set upon some part of a man’s life; the pledge of a covenant between God and man.” The word can also denote a “token, sign, or symbol.”

“As late as the 14th century,” the OED explains, “there were still traces in English of the wider application of the word formerly current; while the seven sacraments were viewed as eminently entitled to the name, it could be applied in a more general sense to certain other rites.” The explanations of the OED are enlightening to me. Can I talk of experiences

of nature as sacramental experiences? They can be means of divine grace – but only in the “widened application.” While You did not explicitly command them, Jesus, they fit into our experience of You.

Every time I walk down to the bridge over Houghton Creek, near Lambein Women’s Dorm, and stand there, looking at the water streaming out beneath me, I experience grace. The supernatural is not in the water itself. It is in the words that You, Holy Spirit of God, have placed in the mouth of the creek: words of consolation and courage. I am reminded, whenever I watch a river or a stream, flowing so endlessly, that I am now an eternal being – an immortal. With this perspective, I can stand to watch You, Jesus, bearing my pain. I can almost count your cost worthwhile.

Yet I recognize that Houghton Creek does something different for me than taking the Eucharist. There is promise and prophecy involved in the Lord’s Supper that is not involved in standing on a bridge watching water, however beautiful.

Even though I don’t feel like I understand sacramental theology as well as I would like to, I believe it. I have only to walk out into the glamourous, coloured quiet of a morning such as we had today, to feel sacrament as true. You shimmer down softly in the sunlight, press Your cool body against me in the wind. You cling to the earth in the determined dew. You take me flying with the Canada geese as they clamour and beat the air, not even aware that they are dreaming.

You are the God who wanted the earth. You are the Christ who took a corporal Body.

Waiting

I read from Dag Hammarskjöld’s “Markings” this morning. He wrote of “the sacrament of the arctic summer night,” and that made me happy. And this entry gave me joy too, because I have felt the same:

So rests the sky against the earth. The dark still tarn in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife’s body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning.

I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no – but refreshed, rested – while waiting.

What are you waiting for? Whom are you waiting for, Dag Hammarskjöld? I am waiting for Jesus. He will restore the earth. He will heal my broken relationship with the dust of which we were made.

Consolation

Right now I am sad. I recognize in my heart a gratitude that Your love and healing are not ‘only’ spiritual - that You are consoling me through the whole world – through the physical of bread and wine, through heat puffing up out of the radiators, through warm lamp light in a friend’s living room, and a heavy blanket on her couch. Sometimes I think that it is when I am weakest and hardest to console that Your physical world means most to me, whether in the warm tightness of an embrace, or the warm tightness of nature. As Aquinas would argue about physical pleasure and the “perfect happiness” of unbroken union with You, if there were no physical dimension to consolation, then consolation would not be as consoling as it could be. In my current state of mind, I think I could find it in me to be grateful for anything. Still, the sacramental nature of Your love is really a greater source of blessing than I ever adequately realise.

The Waterfall

Then there is water. Just water. If I were forced to choose only one element of Your creation to keep, it would be water – the most marvelous, profound thing. I wonder how You ever conceived of water. It is so full of variation. Its colours, its sounds, its temperature, its movement… Within a single lake, I swim through differences, moving with bewilderment from warm to cold. I don’t understand how water can be one and yet legion—how a lake can have patches, how a river can be made up of billions of individual drops. Sometimes I stop to wonder how each drop of the river rapids would feel if it had a heart, and thank You that it doesn’t. The prospect of caring for every hurtling water drop overwhelms me; yet You are not overwhelmed by the reality of caring for every hurtling human being.

I have loved rivers and streams, have loved lakes, and the sea, loved to drink, loved to feel strength streaming along my long hair when I swim under the surface of a swimming pool, loved puddles.

Perhaps most of all waters, I have loved waterfalls.

There are two places in the north west of Benin where there are waterfalls, les cascades. One of these is close by the village of Tanougou. I have been there many times. There are three falls, in an uneven row, and two of them have deep pools in which you can swim. The waterfall furthest up the mountain would fit anyone’s idea of a waterfall in the jungles of darkest Africa. It is wide and deep, and overhung by vines, moss, and dripping cliff. The water is faintly yellow, and laps only stealthily, taking shallow, secret breaths in the shadows. The cascade itself falls from a great height, with thunder. I have jumped from about a third of the rock face, but have never known anyone to have jumped from the very top.

But the first waterfall, my favourite, is an enchanted place. It is crowded by great rock boulders with smooth rounded surfaces where we lay out our swim towels and sit in the patches of sun. Overhung by dark cliff and shading trees, somehow the shadows are welcome, and the depths safely unfathomable. You aren’t frightened, swimming there, and you aren’t frightened, jumping, once you’ve done it a few times (well, maybe just a bit!)

I don’t know how to describe it, besides that being there has always been a spiritual experience. Standing on a rock shelf under the weight of the water as it comes bolting down, I am washed, washed, washed away, until I sing with all my heart in the water that slips off of my battered body, into the gently quivering pool.

I have met You there in a different way than I have met You elsewhere. Sitting on a rock slab with my feet in the water, I have contemplated all of my life and my love, the sacrifice of surrender as I have hurtled over the cliff of everything corrupted by Death, the holiness I have found in the quiet as well as the thunderous roar.

I remember the last time I went to the falls. Some of my students from Parakou Christian School were with me. Bethany, eight years old, came and sat beside me on one of the rocks as I sat meditating and writing. Transported, I tried to tell her about the meaning these falls held for me. I explained that there was a verse in the Bible about waterfalls, and asked her if she could hear the deep calling – hear how the falling water seemed to be calling, and the water in the pool seemed to be answering. Weren’t their voices deep? She listened carefully. “Yes,” she breathed, looking up at me from rounded blue eyes. She was a beautiful child. Probably it isn’t considered worthwhile or even healthy to try to communicate to a small child the strangest, most spiritual wonder you feel. But when I was teaching and living with these children, I couldn’t help it. And I really think they understood.

The Psalm is the forty-second:

Deep calls to deep,

in the roar of Your waterfalls;

all Your waves and breakers

have swept over me.

I found a piece by Annie Dillard, “To Fashion a Text,” that gets at how I feel about my waterfall. She is discussing the act of writing her book ‘An American Childhood,” which is fascinating in itself, but what held immediate meaning for me was the passage about a jungle boy and a waterfall.

She writes:

…in [“An American Childhood”] ...I put in what it was that had me so excited all the time – the sensation of time pelting me as if I were standing under a waterfall. I loved the power of the life in which I found myself. I loved to feel its many things in all their force…

In my study on Cape Cod, where I write, I’ve stuck above my desk a big photograph of a little Amazonian boy whose face is sticking out of a waterfall or a rapids. White water is pounding all around his head, in a kind of wreath, but his face is absolutely still, looking up, and his black eyes are open dreamily on the distance. That little boy is completely alive; he’s letting the mystery of existence beat on him. He’s having his childhood, and I think he knows it. And I think he will come out of the water strong, and ready to do some good.”

This is one of the most beautiful and personal things I have ever read. It makes sense to me – making me feel like some stranded foreigner who suddenly hears something in her own language. She captures how I have felt standing under my waterfall – that I will come out “strong.” That I will come out, as David witnessed, with my soul restored.

The Vision

Last night while I was worshipping, I had a vision. It wasn’t a true vision, in the sense of actually seeing and experiencing things that were not physically real, but it was a vision in the sense of a perfect, waking dream. We were singing “All Who Are Thirsty,” a song inviting both healing for our brothers and sisters, and Your needed return. It is partly Psalm 42 in song, and whenever we sing “As deep cries out to deep,” slowly and with passion, I never fail to lament my inability to express how completely my soul responds.

What I remember of this “vision” was that the waterfall at Tanougou – the one I love – was You, in a more vivid way than I ever before knew. You were the water that splashed and danced on the surface of the pool, and You were the unknown depths heaving and swelling below. The eager African children from the village nearby were shinnying up the tree that overhangs the pool and plunging down, shrieking with pleasure, as they like to do, hoping for smiles and coins from the tourists who stand shuddering on the rocks. And I saw that these children were Your children. They were jumping into Your laughter. Into Your safe, undefeatable depth. I saw this with brilliant clarity: that we are your ragged, happy children, letting ourselves dance out existence in empty space, falling into You.

That we are all these specific urchins, from a tiny village in the poorest part of Benin, who always irritated me by their intrusive offers of help and entertainment, made the vision all the more wonderful.

God, in Your Holy Spirit You are my Rain, my Wind. As a Father You are the pool beneath the waterfall – the voice of my falling is one ‘deep,’ calling, calling, calling to Your receiving depths below. You make springs of Living Water well up in my soul. You are the River whose streams make glad the City of God.

God, You are my God. Earnestly I seek You. My soul thirsts for You, my body longs for You, in a dry and weary land where there is no Water.

In a land where we need wind and water, I and my sisters and brothers are Your ragged urchins, and You are our World.

Incarnation

2007-12-05T19:21:00.000-08:00

~ Debra Rienstra

I.
Framed in museums she is translucent,
as if sighs could pass through her, soft-edged
as moon-glow, smooth as satined marble.
Serene, jeweled, inclined
in posed compassion, a lily-maiden face
upturned to answer politic desires.

We queen her, squared in two dimensions,
beg her to decant the watery pulp
of our prayers.

II.
Her eyes close, her mountained belly
quakes, veed thighs shudder,
a glazed infant head
bulges the taut O
of mortal earth
astonished.

She lifts him to her salt-streaked cheek,
her young mouth laughing. She frees her hair
caught tight in his unyielding fist.

III.
In the rupturing witness
of our bodies, the clutch
of infant hunger,
she queens us.

Mary’s Gethsemane

2007-12-05T19:18:00.000-08:00

~ Debra Rienstra

Keeping vigil with her infant,
night creeping round to night,
the wondrous birth-star blurred
through half-closed lids,
did she hear his cries
rise to reproach:
Woman, can you not watch one hour with me?

And as she offered him
sweet sacrament of herself,
did his eager taking
pound through raw tissue
of obedience till she wept
helpless, lonely tears,
pierced to the heart with weariness:
this tendered flesh too weak?

Morning Petitions

2007-12-05T19:14:00.000-08:00

~ Eric Potter

Let the birds sing back the sun.

Let the dew anoint the grass,

the sky grow pale with longing and the trees

breathless to receive the light.

Let the flowers open their throats

to bees bearing the golden host,

murmuring benediction.

Let the squirrels gather the day’s manna,

and the rabbits keep their brown vigils,

feeding on secret tenderness.

Let the deer, ghosting field and forest,

find rest in their beds of laurel.

Let the breeze rouse leaf and branch,

let each bush grow glad with green.

Desperate Times

2007-12-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

~ Eric Potter

And what would you have done

if it had been your daughter dying,

if you had spent all your days

and every last denarius on doctors,

quacks who took your cash

then shrugged their shoulders

while your daughter drew closer to death?

At last I was desperate enough

even to go to the Jews.

He wasn’t much to look at,

though he could draw a crowd,

and if half the tales I’d heard were true

he could heal a troop of daughters.

I could feel his power,

palpable as his contempt

and the Jews-only sneer with which

he snubbed my request,

but I could see that he loved

to bargain, as sharp a trader

as any of his tribe,

so I made a counter offer

(and threw in a low bow).

He produced a clever comeback

about kids and dogs—

Christ, what a casuist—

but I gave as good as I got,

tossing back his talk of breadcrumbs.

A deal struck, at last, I turned to leave

but he began extolling my faith,

a transparent effort to save face

for relenting to a Gentile and a woman.

I let it go. Why bother haggling?

My daughter was healed. I’d won.

Still Life

2007-12-05T19:02:00.000-08:00

~ Eric Potter

Forty martyrs who followed Christ

all the way to a cold grave,

frozen in bas relief whose stillness

still conveys their agony.

Naked from the waist up, their muscled

torsos contort against the cold,

their arms are clenched across their chests

or raised in supplication to Christ,

enthroned, three angels on each side,

their draperied bodies still bent in worship.

Imagine how they must have trembled

when immersed in icy water, spastic

at first, their limbs numbing, their brown

skin pale then blue, their blood withdrawn,

and one by one their systems down,

heart beat slow, slower, stopped.

An indelicate death, so delicately carved.

Forty martyrs who will follow Christ,

their bodies rising on the last day,

their bulging calves and sculpted pecs

free from the still, cold clutch of ivory death.

Based on “Berlin, Ivory with the Forty Martyrs of Sebast” [plate 1] in Kurt Weitzmann, The Icon: Holy Images—Sixth to Fourteenth Century. New York: George Braziller, 1978.

Longing, Desire, Mortality, and Quirky Delight: A Conversation with Susanna Childress

2007-12-05T18:46:00.000-08:00

~ edited by Elizabeth Mizelle

Linda Mills-Woolsey: One of the things that struck me when I was reading Jagged with Love, especially the second time through, was that it’s a painful book in some ways, but it’s a deeply joyful book. It seems to me that it’s exuberant. There’s a lot of play in it. How do you see the role of the poet in balancing those two things: the pain of the life and the joie de vivre?

Susanna Childress: Well, I think that’s probably why I titled the book Jagged with Love. I think that there are very few experiences that don’t involve some measure of pain. I mean, what relationship do you know that is deep and rich that isn’t without its complexities? I don’t know why I necessarily move towards discussing relationships except that most of my poems are narrative in form, and so I’m telling the story of something, and often the story ends up being about relationships.

I was really surprised when Billy Collins picked this book. Most people find Billy Collins very funny, which I think is one of the reasons he’s so popular. People laugh at his jokes and find a lot of joy there. And I expressed my surprise to Ron Wallace, the series editor for the Brittingham prize, and he said, “Are you kidding me? I thought, if your poems weren’t laugh out loud funny, there was a lot of humor and some hilarity in there.” And I was like, “Where was that? I missed that. Where was the hilarity? Point me to it.” Back to the question of the poet’s responsibility or the poet’s place to negotiate pain and joy: I think the poet’s place is to offer both.

L: Well, one of the reasons that I took a lot of these poems as more joyful than perhaps you feel is that there’s a lot of playfulness in the book. That playfulness most stood out to me in your quirky delight in the body, in things that are sensory. In some of the poems this playfulness about the body and physical life is coupled with the speaker’s focus on being seen and being desired. I found that kind of surprising. Given, you know, the text on the back of the book, I was expecting something different.

S: You mean how many times they mention lust on the back cover?

L: Well, yes, yes.

S: That was great. My mom loved that.

L: Well, yes, I imagine. Mothers love that.

But the body stuff is much more complicated than that. Would you comment a little bit about embodiment, desire, sex, physicality. What were you after?

S: I have no idea.

I don’t know that I consciously worked towards expressing quirky delight in the body. I know that… and this can encourage, or threaten, those of you who are in college. Two of these poems were written when I was a senior in college and the rest were written between the time I was twenty-two and twenty-five. That is a chaotic time for any person, but especially for a woman who’s been raised in the evangelical protestant culture, a Christian culture where nobody talks about sex. There is, from a very young age, a strong, strong desire to love and to be loved and to know and be known. And now I know what that is. That is the relationship of the Trinity. That’s the work of the Father and the Spirit and the Son, and their relationship with one another, and that intimacy placed within us, our desire for intimacy and for belonging.

I’m really grateful that you wouldn’t just label it lust. It bothers me that it’s described as lust. I wrote these poems when I was young, but I would say that the same is true now. The body is such a strange thing, the way that it works and doesn’t work, how we choose or don’t choose to follow its impulses, and the way it ages, and the way it works with and against our spirits. And so it wasn’t as if I wrote sex into the book, but I imagined what life would be like as a married person, or as someone who was completely comfortable with the body and completely comfortable with sexuality. A lot of the persona poems give themselves over to that and are written fully from those perspectives.

L: You just mentioned tying together your longing and desire and theological things, but there are also the meditations on illness and mortality and tumors. And even when you’re thinking about what we would call the downside of the body, its tendency to go awry, you don’t seem to be afraid to imagine it really physically. That’s one of the things that I really envy, the frankness of your speaking. The persona poems fascinated me and that, I think, is one of the ways you get more of a range than you often find in a first book of poems. Can you tell us a little bit about how you started doing that?

S: Sure. I often read a poem called “Daughter in the Waiting Room.” I was a senior in college and my roommate’s best friend’s mother had a hole in her skull, and my roommate relayed this to me and was telling me that they were going in to do surgery on her. They were going to cut from ear to ear and peel back her scalp and look at this hole, because they had never seen anything like it. They’d seen cancer, but they’d never seen absence. At that point I was distraught about the surgery and whatever this mysterious illness was. I was just so moved that a girl my age would be going through something like this with her mother, so I sat down and wrote from her perspective.

I think it’s so important that, as Shelley mentioned, poems ask you to put yourself in someone else’s place, to actually visualize yourself in someone else’s place. Sometimes my own life just got a little weary to me, and I wanted to write about more important things. The way for me to do that was to allow my big old sponge of a heart to get sucked into someone else’s situation and try and imagine what it would be like. Such imagination leads to migraines and nightmares, but thankfully this imagination has allowed me, as a poet, to go lots of places and to imagine lots of things, for example, being a mother with breast cancer. I hear stories, and I soak in other people’s experience. I know that God created us with that capacity for sorrow and joy, and so thankfully we’ve been given outlets for those great repositories of sympathy.

L: Sometimes when I was reading Jagged with Love, I was thinking about Donne. Some people separate the Donne who writes love poems and Donne who writes devotional poems, but I see one poet when I’m reading him, and I thought your poems had that kind of sacramental awareness. It seems that the theological undercurrent in Jagged with Love is a kind of tie running beneath the surface of all of the physicality. A lot of the imagery is very sensory, very in the moment, and it seemed to me that it was an interesting mix of thanksgiving, puzzlement, irony, and devotion. Could you say a little bit about your theology, as it was then, and as your journey is taking you now?

S: Sure, sure.

Well, maybe.

You know I came from a Christian school, Indiana Wesleyan, and then was very rudely thrust into the carnivalesque world of grad school. I saw somebody roll a joint for the first time in my life. I had never ever known a homosexual person before. So there were a lot of firsts in grad school and I think – no, I know – that shaped the way I wrote poems. It wasn’t as though I went undercover, I just recognized that I wanted people to get to know me first as Susanna, and then if they did get to know me, they would find out that I had a passionate faith and love for Jesus. Well, they were often very shocked, but then they created space for me to be a Christian and perhaps widened their understanding of what a Christian could be, that perhaps maybe Christians can be thoughtful, or write good work.

After my first reading at Florida State University, during my doctoral program, a guy who was maybe in his fourth or fifth year of doctoral studies came up to me and said, “You have just ruined a theory that I’ve been working on for the last ten years.”

I said, “Oh my goodness, what is that?”

And he said, “That evangelicals don’t make good art.” He was trying to compliment me, but, wow, was it backhanded.

I think I desperately wanted there to be an understanding of God’s goodness in my poetry, and a holiness and beauty not from ourselves, but I don’t know that I wanted to name it and pin it down. I certainly did not want to be known as a Christian poet. And in fact, that’s still something that is confusing and mystifying to me.

I also write short stories, and I ran into Brett Lott, who edits an anthology of the best Christian fiction every year. He said to me, “Oh, send me your stuff.”

Well, first, I don’t think my fiction is good enough to meet Brett Lott’s standards, but second, I met with Scott Cairns and asked him, “Do you think that’s a good move for me?”

He said “I don’t want to tell you what to do.”

So I asked, “What would you do?”

And he answered, “I would not have done that at the beginning of my career. Perhaps now.” I don’t know how old he is, but at least 50, deep into his career, very established at the university where he is, at the University of Missouri at Columbia. He’s deeply respected by writers across the country. He said, “I would do it now, but I don’t think I would do it at your age. Because people immediately will categorize you and make assumptions about you.” So I’m still wrestling with that.

The second thing I want to say is that writing about faith is difficult. It just takes such thoughtfulness to write with freshness about faith. It is way too easy to rely on clichés and the same old metaphors and the same old sort of gestures that you might make. And I can’t yet do it. It’s too powerful a thing. I’ve tried. Actually, the very last poem in the book, “After the Virgin of Vladimir, 12^th century, Anonymous,” came out of an assignment I gave myself. I was going to write a poem for every icon that was in Henri Nouwen’s Behold the Beauty of the Lord, where he goes through and looks at the Virgin of Vladimir, Andrei Rublev’s Savior of Zvenigorod, and a couple others that I never wrote about. I didn’t finish the assignment. But writing an ekphrastic poem was a way for me to get at my faith and to sort of wrestle with issues of faith.

The epigram in my new book is from Johnny Cash. He said once, “My arms are too short to box with God.” That’s the epigraph of my new book. So I’m letting it out a little more, and yet I have to say that wrestling with God is fairly fashionable, so I don’t want to stop there. I don’t want to stop with wrestling. I want there also to be in this next book, and in anything else I write, absolute love and joy in His presence, and an understanding of His grace and forgiveness and healing. So I hope that too is in the book. I hope it’s not just wrestling.

Swallow: To-Where-It-Ends

2007-12-02T11:51:00.001-08:00

~ Jillian Sokso

(Full Image)

(Detail View)

Swallow: The-Shape-Of-Me

2007-12-02T11:48:00.000-08:00

~ Jillian Sokso

(Full Image)

(Detail View)

Swallow: Flagrant

2007-12-02T11:43:00.001-08:00

~ Jillian Sokso

(Full Image)

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Swallow: Feeder-Bully

2007-12-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

~ Jillian Sokso

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(Detail View)

Swallow - Artist Statement

2007-12-02T08:54:00.000-08:00

~ Jillian Sokso

In concept and theme, the primary narrative of my work deals with an abstract view of the female gender by personifying that role with depictions of animated objects that stereotypically represent femininity. In addition to these abstractions, the work deals in ideas about communication and relationship by way of a mark, lyrical and language based. Imagery used in this work has evolved from mental perceptions of occasion, environment and roles I have observed or own.

Most recently, my work has been examining my personal role in the lives of my immediate family, the role of wife and mother. During pregnancy, my husband’s hobby of birding became a conceptual draw for my work. I would consider the action and song of the species drawn to our bit of land, to the feeders and the vegetation we had cultivated. The incessant preparation on behalf of the bird to seek and gather mirrored to my own instinctive and obsessive need to ready my mind and life for the changes of that day, and those ahead. In addition, the role reversal that my family would soon acquire was a constant voice, what did it mean for us that our child would be primarily cared for by her father, while I worked out of the home? I love to consider our situation in contrast to that of the bird species, that the males are colorful and fancy, while the female, dull and uncelebrated, nests in guard over the future of the flock.

This collection of work continues to be an exploration of formal and conceptual elements charged and examined through process of media. A theme that overwhelms this work is the methodology of combining and composing imagery based in multiple medias within printmaking. The idea of the multiple within history has traditionally represented many of one image. This work represents multiples generated from much imagery, merging, overlapping and meeting in different ways through various method and technique. I have unquestionably realized that the work itself is brought about by exploration of concept and idea in relation to the evolution coursed when imagery moves from one media into another.

The Troubadours

2007-12-02T08:48:00.000-08:00

~ Luisa Josefina Hernández, Published 1973 by Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, S.A. in México, D.F.

(An excerpt from Chapter 1 - translated from the Spanish by Nan Hussey)

She, descended alone in terror of seeing them all gathered together, dreading that she might raise her hand at the first stone. There was the indecision of waiting for them to eat and the fear that once they’d eaten they would lock their doors and turn themselves over to the pleasures of being together, of life in the beehive, savoring the news of the day or saving sleep for the coming dawn. No, she would speak now, while some were still coming down from the hills and others were standing in their doorways.
“Listen to me!” she called. It was a voice that might have promised scandal. “Listen to me!”
Some approached her with their animals and others left their doorways, while the men who worked at the looms came out to the bleating, the gossip, the press of bodies.
“God is among us.” She was a coward but her voice did not tremble. “God is in the threads strung on the loom and in the wooden spindle. He’s right here in the smell of the herds. God is right here and I’ve come to say it so that you don’t forget that He meets you here, so that you’ll sense that your soul is His pure reflection and that you are a work of pure grace.”
They looked at her, their mouths hanging open, and she figured out that the object of their attention was her tunic, abundantly embroidered with threads of gold . . . The women were talking in low voices and she realized that perhaps they were comparing her garments to wedding clothes or party dresses. She covered herself with her cloak.
“Please tell me if you have heard.” With her eyes she sought the village woman who had come with her but was unable to locate her. She got no response. “My role is to walk along the roads and visit the villages, cities and places where people gather in order to tell them that God is among them.”
Silence. The pregnant women, their eyes alarmed and their arms crossed over their bellies, revealing well-freckled skin; their husbands with an air of possession and who knows what discontent standing in front of these colossal figures: All looked at the strange woman with suspicion and with simulated disdain. The children had already taken themselves off to play at persecuting each other and were running between the people standing there, shielding themselves from the stranger among those they knew.
“Listen,” it was an elderly woman whose eyes were clear and whose hands were hardened from work, whose joints were like iron, “many years ago someone like you passed through this town and a great miracle occurred in that we were all left without husbands, raising our children alone. He was a handsome young man, richly dressed, with a clear voice and very like you in every way. He told them to go with him. He said they should follow him in order to go to the mountains to reflect on God. He told them they had do to this in order to erase the traces of sin we harbor in our beds beneath our oat straw comforters. They left …” The elderly woman looked toward the end of the town as if the men were leaving at this moment and the women were watching them go. “They didn’t even turn around to take their leave … I was left with four children.”
“I’m not asking anyone to follow me. I come to deliver this short message and to make sure there are some who have heard it.”
“They’ve already heard it. Leave them be.” The villagers formed knots of people as if this were a feast day or a market day and everyone was prepared to march off to the big town to sell their simple products. “Who are you looking for?”
“For a woman who came with me and who later went on ahead.” She blushed, considering the tale of the elderly woman. They followed her too. She too moved stones from their places and made them roll.
“Ah. Do you know what happened to the men who followed the youth dressed in silver and gold?”
“No.”
“They stayed in the next city and dedicated themselves to licentiousness and theft. Some of them even became murderers. The young man abandoned them and took off with others.”
“Ah.” She had to blush openly and didn’t dare ask again.
“Do you know where your village woman is?”
“No. I told you I didn’t know.”
“She’s locked in the granary with my son. They’re entertaining each other so well that they haven’t realized you’ve arrived. He lost his wife eight months ago and was left with two children.”
“I wasn’t looking for her in order to take her with me. She’s alone in the world. She can serve as wife and mother.” She looked at the people, some of whom were already turning their backs and then a sharp little cobblestone hit her on the cheek. The wound became a trefoil of blood and she trembled, but didn’t make any movement to leave nor did she touch her face. The elderly woman moved closer to her.
“What a strange wound!” Another cobblestone crossed the air and landed on the forehead of the old woman.
“What are you doing?” The villagers turned around quickly, none having seen what had happened. “You’re stoning this woman and me. You stupid cowards.” Both women were sporting trefoils of coagulated blood like petal-shaped adornments.
“God is here,” said the pilgrim softly.
“It was the children,” a woman answered. “Undoubtedly they didn’t mean to do it.”
“It was this guy,” said a man and pushed a youth forward whose strong, brown hand was holding a slingshot.
“It was me.”
“Why?” she asked. “Did you mean to hurt us?”
“Someone robbed us of the two goats we had. Someone else made off with the blankets my mother and I had woven. She told me, ‘I’m going to ask God to help us,’ and she set herself to praying. Now you come instead of God. And this old lady, instead of telling you to leave so that God Himself can come goes out to tell you her old wives’ tales.” The boy looked at the cheek of the one and the forehead of the other. “On top of that, I believe I missed when I shot as these marks you have there don’t look like they were made by a stone.” The boy was weakened by anger and pale with hatred, his eyes enlarged and glittering, his voice breaking.
A man approached and took him by the arm.
“Nobody took your blankets. Your mother gave them to me in exchange for some money your father owed. I didn’t even ask her for them. She did it because she’s proud and because …;” he turned around toward the other villagers. “Now that she’s a widow I wanted to marry her but she didn’t accept me in order not to grieve you. Come to my house and look for your blankets and don’t speak ill of your neighbor without knowing what you’re talking about. As for the goats you can look through my herd and pick out the two you like best. And tell your mother that she is never again to come asking me to marry anyone who tolerates and protects a runny-nosed brat who pelts defenseless women with stones.”
The man’s anger was growing and the boy’s was diminishing to the extent that he let go of the slingshot. Looking with fear and surprise but without any hatred at the one who was reprimanding him, he made no effort to free his arm while the man continued looking at the signs left by the stones.
“God is here,” said the man, his eyes full of tears.
The villagers heard him and this time they listened. They made the sign of the cross, fell on their knees and every one of them scrutinized the depths of his or her memory and cried with shame.
“Let go of my arm. You’re bruising me,” said the boy. The man did so and the youth wrapped his arms around his body. “Are you going to bring the blankets?”
“I’m going to give them to you.”
“Take them to her yourself and don’t tell her I’m a runny-nosed brat or that I stone women. And I’m going with you.”
“Let’s go.” The man looked at the two women and he kissed the hems of both their garments. “God is here. We’ll see which goats give more milk.”
The elderly woman looked at them and then at the people.
“I too have sinned. I’ve paid, I’ve sinned and I’ve paid again. Now I’m too old and yet my heart is breaking with joy and repentance. All I can do is pray and I have to tell you that I prayed this afternoon.”
“Did you ask for anything?”
“I asked that my son would find a strong, hard-working wife. I’m going to die soon. Is what I’ve got on my forehead the same as what you have on your face?”
“It’s a red flower, a drawing in blood, a sign of … of I don’t know what. I’m going.”
“We’ll see each other again some day. You haven’t taken anything from us. Do you have food with you?”
“No.”
“Come to my house because the road is awfully long and very hard. If someone with a cart is going to town maybe they can take you.”
“I have to go on foot.”
“That’s your business. Come eat.”
She followed the elderly woman and they entered a small, not very clean house, a house like any other.
“Sit down,” and the pilgrim let herself fall onto a bench. “I notice you’re awfully tired.”
Well, she knew it herself, but she wasn’t the type to make excuses; it would seem more like she was complaining about the effort or her duties and this wasn’t the case.
“I’m not tired. It’s just that I conserve my energy and therefore I rest and sleep whenever possible.” She set herself to eating, remembering the last time she’d eaten, in the home of the woman in the other village. How long ago had it been? It dawned on her that she was losing her sense of time, like someone who slowly grew deaf. She drank the milk with reluctance.
“I suppose that people like you also aren’t allowed to sleep under a roof,” said the owner of the house, with a touch of scorn.
“I’m not sure, but I never do.” The truth was that she’d been clearly told she was to travel wherever her feet took her, but she didn’t receive any instructions in reference to sleeping nor how she was to feed herself. If choosing between her fears it was best to displease well-intentioned villagers. She didn’t dare accept hospitality from anyone nor carry food with her in order to alleviate the hardships of the road.
She began to drink the milk in the bowl, then to eat the bread and honey that the woman offered her in pre-prepared slices, as if she were afraid they would otherwise be rejected. A deep sense of well-being came over her, a solemn sweetness. She closed her eyes, supporting her face in her hands, and she fell asleep at the table. The old woman looked at her with the long experience of having contemplated many sleeping people; deep sleepers, fainters and meditators.
“What a shame,” she said in a low voice, “so young.” Her eyes filled with tears. She had often thought about the spruced up cemetery full of both crosses that were always repainted and of gravestones made of clay whitened with lime to make them look nice. She considered it her future home, the natural place in the end for those born in the village. It was where two of her children, a little grandson and her parents already were, the place that awaited her too when she became no more than a silent, fragile replica of herself. Now she watched those white crosses parade across the face of the unknown woman who looked like a girl when she rested.
She heard steps outside. They belonged to her son and that village woman who had arrived several hours ago, with her open appetites, her voracious gaze and her free and easy gestures. The woman’s hair was loose now and full of the breeze, her respiration rhythmic, her expression satisfied. Her son wore a melancholy air. That’s what men are like once the fever of love has passed and there’s no need to pay any attention to them. He’d presented a far different side of himself this morning.
“Don’t talk too loud. We have a guest and she’s asleep.”
“Who?”
“A wanderer.”
“I came with her,” the village woman explained in a modest tone that concealed both some vague arrogance and the desire to please.
“You? What were you doing with her?” She already knew, but she wanted to hear her answer.
“I followed her and then later I went on a little ahead.”
“In order to eat, no doubt, and for other reasons, as you’ve demonstrated.”
The village woman looked over the old woman’s shoulder in order to reassure herself that the pilgrim wasn’t listening and saw she was asleep.
“Ma’am, your son lacks a wife. I had a son and I lost him. I have no husband. I have plenty of stamina when it comes to work and I arrived with no intention of ending up in the granary with your son.”
“I’m far too old not to know about intentions and what comes of trips to the granary,” she said and looked at her son. “Do you want to marry her? Do you think her capable of taking care of your children and your animals?” He nodded and his mother understood that he wouldn’t say anything with the woman present. “Look, woman, this sky blue house that you can see from here belongs to him and his children, who are certainly hungry. These are the children that would become yours. Look in on them and take care of them. Now, let me talk with him.”
The village woman looked at the man, who wouldn’t look her in the eyes. She then sought the pilgrim anxiously, as if a word, a sign from her would be capable of clearing up any misunderstanding she’d felt arise and begin to grow between her, the man, the old woman and those children she didn’t even know yet.
“Tell her that … I’m staying here.” She set off at a run toward the new house and while she approached it she was thinking about her own son, about her own child, his death and burial, the smell and the feel of him. For the first time his death, which dominated her life, seemed a definite disgrace. Her heart filled with tears but she didn’t release them. What would these strange children be like? What would the other children be like that would come from the savage embraces of that man?
Now alone, mother and son entertained themselves looking at a red geranium in a flowerpot.
“Do you love her?” No reply. “Of course not. I’m a silly old fool. It’s old age. Love isn’t something you can know, but it is something you can guess at. Could you come to love her?”
He thought about the other woman, the one he’d courted for two years and who didn’t talk; the one who for modesty’s sake didn’t writhe in his arms unless he pressed his lips against hers so as to smother the words and her cooing; the one who gave herself more authentically than this frenetic female who animated him and who had awakened his lechery along with his nostalgia for caresses, perhaps forever, and who had also forever awakened his longing for the dead woman …
“She’ll do. There aren’t many. She looks strong, doesn’t have too bad a character, and as we say she’s certainly sharp.” He suddenly smiled. “You never know. It could be that her character’s bad and she turns out to be sharper than you and I together. She isn’t ugly.” The old woman sighed. For an instant she had a fleeting vision of what true love would be; its vocabulary and what it would permit, what silent fits of ecstasy and what ancestral fears … “Can you lean back so I can look at the traveler?”
The mother moved over to one side and went to light the candle in a corner. The son moved gently forward until he could distinguish her white face with its cheek stained with red.
“Mother, what did you do?”
“Why?”
“You have a mark on your forehead that’s just like hers.”
“Some stones were thrown. But that’s over and done.”
“Where is she going?”
“She tells the whole world that God is found among us. She isn’t headed to any place in particular.” The man went to the door and his mother followed him.
“I’m smeared with sin from my head on down. If God sees me He won’t forgive me.”
“God forgives old goats, young lambs and stud rams. God would forgive you if you drank water with your hands or ate your bread in the corner like dogs do.”
“Then God would think He’d created a man instead of an animal with four legs. Thanks for consoling me, but I’ve brought sin into my house before the eyes of God Himself and I have to live with it.”
“That woman came with this one. Perhaps …”
“Take a good look at her. She doesn’t look anything like the other one. It’s enough to look at either of them closely. I already know that one. I left you with this one so that you could make sure.”
The man headed for his house. His step was firm and defeated; the children, the woman, the big young kid with the wounded foot, daily life, nights, mornings, hundreds of words.
The old woman dropped onto the makeshift bed where she passed her hazy nights and covered herself halfway with her black and white blanket, but she didn’t want to put out the candle. She was going to contemplate the sleeper. How was it that things like this happened? This woman and that one. One the one hand, women who arrive out of nowhere to occupy vacancies already prepared for them, if not to their exact measurements; and others, like the one in the cloak, rootless, floating in space, with no bed, no right to daily bread, not allowed to travel in an old cart pulled by an ox. It wasn’t good to even think about the rest of it. This beggar dressed in gold had never shared a bed with anyone and she would be forbidden to under pain of … what? She felt rather shaken up and afraid as logic began to penetrate her. This beggar only strolled around so that others might find food and shelter, spouse and orderly daily activities. As she came to understand it thoroughly, the light of the candle waxed the length of her hand. The room shone in a way that was almost dazzling and she was so old that neither insomnia nor sleep mattered.
She started to think about the many nights of her life. Those of her childhood were barely within reach of her memory. Not even vague, tepid sensations remained: the rafters in her room; the death of her little sister accompanied by the weeping of the hired mourners that had begun exactly at ten o’clock that night and which had ended at six o’clock in the morning. At that point the women, hoarse and exhausted, were barely moaning. Her youth; a party, or was it two or more parties? Sweat, exhaustion, feeling pretty, admired, scatterbrained for not taking the hint sooner via the insinuations caught in looks, in abrupt expressions and in indirect phrases of the man she’d married. The wedding night … more acceptable than lovely, more natural than peopled by phantasmagorias that all in all she didn’t entertain to excess because a shepherdess who lives very close to animals knows what there is to know. The work, the sweat, the exhaustion, the births. Sometimes even the bitterest news, when one of her newborn children died, hardened her less over the course of time because it meant daily activity wasn’t further aggravated and she got her strength back sooner. It had even been possible to become a wet nurse for others and to earn some money doing that and then … the loneliness, the thankless chores that repeat themselves because the children get married and have their own lives and you can’t tell them to get on with making the cheese or to separate the cream from the milk or to put the white, humid wool in the sun to dry. You give up the better part of the herds because it turns out to be impossible to take care of them. When the children are good, they supply all that’s necessary for their mother. If not, she soon finds herself skinny, her legs feeling the cold, climbing mountains with a goat on either side. But her own children are good and she isn’t demanding. She could have asked for a new blanket last year and didn’t do it, as if she ignored the fact that heat produced sweetness or as if sweetness were contemptible.
On the other hand, she liked candles more than ever, preferring them to a good fire or a shawl, even though they didn’t give off heat. Darkness was definitely the saddest thing of all. She was also convinced that there was no innocence in candles: Those twisting flames, those flourishes, that turning back into ribbons wound around an imaginary axis was no empty or senseless thing. It was a revelation, a sign, some thing of admirable magic that many fail to comprehend.
This candle was something extraordinary. It waxed and waned, she directed it with her emotions, with her old thoughts that revolved around the sleeping young woman. Was she sleeping too? Why? Who knew how many nights of insomnia were yet ahead, who knew how many times she would look at the ceiling with tired eyes and sleep not coming. Why now when she had company?
The young woman didn’t exhibit discomfort, nor did she seem cold. Her cloak, with its thick cape of moss, was better shelter than a shawl or a blanket. What would she dream of? Surrendered entirely to rest, the traveler’s eyes were half open and her lips were slack. The old woman could see a white line between her lids and a row of snowy teeth. She had to suppress the desire to wake her. She wanted to talk with her, to ask her everyday things, the questions an old woman asks a young one. But that wasn’t considerate, nor fair, nor even polite.
“Do you have a mother?” she would have asked so that the other woman would say … What would she say? What would become of the mother who thought about her daughter in the middle of the road, subject to offense and insult? No, she should be an orphan, raised in a castle and overloaded with serious obligations from earliest childhood, the daughter of a despotic man, the daughter of God and chosen by Him. This last she thought rapidly, naturally and free of any inner theatricality.
“Chosen by God, may God protect you!” She looked at her feet, injured and white, at her hand, also white, but suave and intact, lying abandoned on top of the table.
How much time has she spent on the road? It didn’t seem like much. Nevertheless, there was no place nearby that she could reconcile with the residence of a women with such fine attire. A castle? A duchy? No, nothing but mountains and the news that arrived now and then, every five or ten years, of an extremely far off city where, it was said, every trade had its own guild including jewelers. Just imagine a guild of jewelers and the quantity of jewels and of people who would wear them!
She could only have come from there. But of course, God, who had chosen her, protected her hands and feet, her skin and her eyes. God was unpredictable, omnipotent, incommensurable in the range of His many powers. What effort had it been for Him to take care of a decent young women whose delicate feet had soles that didn’t toughen up, and whose princess hands didn’t chap? The old woman smiled and she looked at her own hands: freckles, knots, her nails gnawed to the quick. She would never see her hands in total splendor now, given that she used them in order to carry out the harshest chores. What effort could it be for God to give her back her hands or at least to give her new ones? None. She kept her chewed up hands under her blouse and looked first at the ceiling and then at the candle. God is here, waxing, waning, drawing faces clearly in the shadows and reflections on the whitewashed walls. What would she say to God? She turned herself face up in order to think more carefully.
“My Lord,” she didn’t want anything absolutely, as if her desires had gone weak over time. To be young and marry and watch her children grow? No. To be a girl and watch her parents die? No. To grow old so she could wait for death in solitude? All of these things had slowly occurred in five-year spans that now seemed but an instant. She couldn’t ask for anything because she had already had everything, everything with the exception of dying. “Thank you, my Lord,” she said at last. “Send me death whenever you want, as it’s the only one of your gifts I haven’t received yet.”
She said it in a low voice, so as not to awaken her visitor; covered herself with her blanket, positioned herself aright and once again stuck her hands beneath her blouse. She was content and had to restrain herself from singing a fragment of a song under her breath, the one she’d always sung to lull her children and grandchildren to sleep: ‘Here comes a goat, down the mountain pass; poor goat, poor mountain, meditates the grass.’ She didn’t sing it; she thought it and repeated the words in her mind until her eyes closed and she fell asleep at the least expected moment, just like a little girl or a distracted ewe.
The candle continued to grow, converted into a thread of light, and it began to trace pictures in the air around the pilgrim; first a halo, then, concentrating on her head it made her a cuiress. Then it converted itself into tiny rays and sprang up around the contours of her body as if she were an image distilling light from the middle of the altar in a temple. After that it drew signs, signals, keys, riddles for the experts, an alpha and an omega, entire alphabets in the air that kept floating and someone, without knowing either how or when, would perceive them and perhaps interpret them — not exactly, but in truncated messages, conceived in order to agitate the heart and to hope for the answer in this very room, converted into a statue …
The pilgrim woke up and the candle returned to its usual dimensions without any trace of its games, nor of it prior activities. She blushed intensely.
“Poor woman,” she said. “No doubt sleep relieved her and she has finally surrendered to it, not knowing if she was sharing her roof with an adventuress or with a woman of bad intentions who might rob her or mistreat her. Forgive me, my Lord.” She saw the unfinished bowl of milk on the table and drank it in one swallow. At any rate, she’d already grazed the glass with her lips. But she didn’t touch the bread, nor the piece of cheese that the elderly woman was keeping under a cloth. “Those aren’t for me.”
She put out the candle with her fingers and headed for the door. The air was icy and the village dark. It might be three o’clock in the morning or a little earlier. From experience she knew that daybreak is the coldest and darkest point as it’s the closest to tepidness and light. Let it be so.
She passed through the village afraid of bumping into a fence or falling into a hole. The village woman who had traveled with her from the other town saw her pass. She’d been at the window for hours wearing the first wife’s nightclothes and her eyes had long since become accustomed to the darkness. She didn’t call out to her. She cried for her son. Nothing, nothing in the world could press against her heart like this child of hers resting back there in the other village, a prettier village than this one, where the air was milder than here and the nights were clearer and starrier.
“My Lord, forgive me some day. Not today, not tomorrow, nor in the days that follow. Forgive me later and don’t look at me like the woman who’s going to be my mother-in-law does, as if I belonged to some human category that everyone has seen and knows well. My Lord, you more than anyone must have seen this sort of people and know it better than any. You know what it’s like, how prideful and mournful, how daring, how scandalous and stubborn, how feverish we can be. That’s why I’m asking you not to forgive me until time erases these distinguishing marks, until no one can recognize me and you confuse me with others and forget me.”
The pilgrim arrived at a broad path and sensed it was the one leading to the larger town that had been mentioned so many times. This was the town where the villagers had been lost following the passing of the other pilgrim and where so many others were saved. It was colder than ever. Every gust beat against her body with a force resembling hailstones or heavy snows. She closed her eyes and stumbled on. She couldn’t keep them open due to the wind. Her tunic and her cloak had never seemed thinner, her skin seemed transparent too and the cold entered everything including her heart. No, no one had said that she might freeze to death because then she wouldn’t be able to carry out her mission. When morning arrived, if she died she’d be guilty of disobedience, more so than had she agreed to be driven in the cart.
The sky turned grayish and the cold pressed in, but now things could be distinguished. She had made it a rule of conduct after having been in a village not ever to return, and she didn’t think about violating it even now. No one could bear being given a message two days in succession, nor allow themselves to be equally moved by the same person with the same words. She had decided this because she knew about cowardice, about the timidity that nearly suffocated her before speaking. She was aware that she always said the same words, repeated the same ideas and didn’t know how to respond to the questions they frequently directed at her nor how to satisfy their petitions. Upon leaving a village, a sensation resembling that of a child who stole and ran came over her. She stole attention, pulled off the job, squawked out the necessary phrases, ate and left on the run. Therefore she couldn’t return now and the path was ascending. Colder and colder, it wouldn’t be long before it began to rain … maybe this was the first day of the rainy season and she was the only one who wasn’t aware of it. She looked up, saw an overhang and below it a black space that could well turn out to be a cave. That often happened: When everything was going badly, when she was tired, the path itself offered her rest or food. If it was a cave, the truth would be that she couldn’t bear this cold any longer and the best thing to do would be to take refuge in it. She climbed rapidly without noticing that she trod on hawthorn, dazed more due to the temperature than due to the pain that tore into her ankle.
It was a cave and someone was in it. She wanted to turn around but a gust pushed her toward the inside of the cave and almost onto the human figure. He was seated on the floor, resting his head against the rock wall, but his rather widely opened eyes indicated he wasn’t sleeping.
“Excuse me, I thought there was nobody in here.” She recognized him immediately. It was the husband from the first village, the father both of the dead boy and of the live one, the husband and lover, the seductress’s stud and the half-hearted spouse of the woman betrayed. “What are you doing here?”
“What you see.”
“You went home.”
“No, never again. No wife, no son, no goats, no pieces of gold. All of it burned my hands and has no value so I left it.”
The traveler before him trembled so violently that instead of continuing to explain himself he guided her towards the rear of the cave. He laid her down on the floor and removed her cloak in order to cover her with it. Then he noticed that her foot had left a track of blood. She closed her eyes. She was so tired that she softened with the heat of her cloak. It was the softness of helplessness converted by solace.
“You have a hawthorn spine in your foot,” said the man. “I can’t pull it out while short on light. If I try to do it now, I could hurt you.”
“Is it raining?”
“No.”
“I thought … that it was snowing.”
“It’s not that time of the year.”
“No?”
“How do you feel?”
“Fine.”
“May I ask you something?” The traveler thought he wanted to find out about the fate of the village woman and felt her spirit densely saturated with affairs like that which, after all, were none of her business.
“Ask.”
“How did you find out it was you who had to wander around leaving the message in every town? Why not someone else?”
She half closed her eyes. It took a great deal of effort to remember and it wasn’t easy to speak.
“In the first place, all of the other women resembled each other. Ever since they were young they had a set occupation, except for me. I reached the age at which most get married and had no inclination toward marriage.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t remember, about six months ago. There wasn’t anything I did well. I didn’t learn to do the simplest chores in a household where the only thing lacking is someone to sit down and embroider tapestries. If I served wine, I spilled it; if soup, I burned people; if I tried to comb out someone’s hair I didn’t dare do it for fear of pulling it out. In short, God gave me a unique role which it seems I’m able to carry out and I dedicated myself to it.”
“But you saw His face and heard His voice?”
“Yes.”
“Are you certain? I’m asking you because out in the country I saw a flock of birds in the shape of an arrow that pointed in this direction, to this cavern that I already knew and then, when I arrived, there was nothing here, neither birds nor anything else. Is that God?”
“God is here, at your side.”
A ray of the sun entered the cave and played over the body of the woman. He noted then the infinite reluctance with which she maintained her eyelids open and the indolence of her hands.
“I’m also a good-for-nothing. What’s that on your cheek?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s the same thing that’s on your foot. Red clover-leafs. I’m going to pull the hawthorn spines out. There’s another cave near here. If you’d like, I’ll go there while you rest in order not to bother you.”
“You’ll go.” She said it as though spelling it out. He was so touched by her somnolence, her abandonment, her weakness, that he didn’t want to oblige her to say anything more. He took her heel with delicacy and saw that in every bloody flower there was a thorn. Then he was filled with hesitation. This was a sign, a sign appearing in the blessed body that he was touching with his dusty hand, a hand that had touched bodies that weren’t blessed and that had also pulled thorns out of the thick hair of goats. Would he have permitted an animal to suffer for a scruple of his soul?
“My Lord, punish me if I’m committing sacrilege.” His hands trembled, he rested his wrists on the rock and pulled out the thorns: There were seven. “Does it hurt much?”
“What are you saying?”
“Nothing, I’m just talking.” He had put the thorns in a row on the hard-packed earth of the floor of the cave and soon it seemed to him that something peculiar was happening to them. Perhaps it was an illusion of tears, because for a long time now his eyes had not been dry. But no, on every thorn there was a flower with four petals, delicate and newly born and the thorns were fixed in the floor as if rooted, and everything was growing right in front of his eyes, and he was frightened, immensely frightened of not being able to embrace the presence of God, not even in this sign, to say nothing of a face-to-face encounter like the one the traveler had had.
“My Lord, your presence is so perturbing, even in an occurrence as small as this one!” He looked at her face and discovered she had died.
Then he put her to one side without leaving the cave, bolder, more audacious, more disposed than ever to anything because he was seeing what God does with those He allows to look upon Him and to listen to Him.
“God,” he said now and then, “God, God, God.”
The thorns cast forth flowering branches that intertwined without touching the body of the pilgrim and formed a sharp and luminous grill from which one could look at her and admire her and watch her distill light in torrents over her beauty, her jewels, the complicated embroidery on her white tunic. The silver flowers on her cloak were covered halfway by the cloth that now looked like the softest, whitest fleece, the fabric most favored for receiving angels.
The spines reached the roof and stopped moving. They weren’t growing any more now. In one hour, or two, they had made a sanctuary, had protected their relic, had preserved her eternally as a sign.
“God,” repeated the shepherd. “I will go down to the village so they’ll all know. Everyone has to come to see the sign, so they’ll feel like I do, so they’ll be touched.”
He took off running toward the village. The shepherds had already left the mountain with their flocks. The smallest children crawled near the sides of their mothers, many of whom were separating the cream from the milk.
He chose one house among the others because he seemed to see more people in it than in any other. He went in. The village woman with whom he’d committed adultery and a man were there kneeling beside the bed of an elderly woman who was dead.
Behind him six mourners dressed in black filed in, their heads covered, their shoulders shaken by convulsive sobs that arose in shrieks. Before they began, the son wanted to kiss the hands of his mother one last time and he found two smooth, white, beautiful hands with flexible, fleshy fingers and rosy, almond-shaped nails.
“Look, everyone,” he said in a low voice.
“A miracle,” said the village woman. “It’s a miracle.” Then she gave a few shouts as if she were terrorized, “It’s a miracle!”
The word began to weave in and out of the houses in the village and to bring people. The mourners wailed the three syllables of mir-a-cle instead of crying without rhyme or reason. The shepherds returned to the mountain and the man remained standing there, completely bewildered. He said nothing about the woman who was in the cavern because no one was paying any attention to him.
“God is everywhere.” Wasn’t that what she said? Wasn’t that it? “Therefore everything is a miracle. This and what happened in the cave, and the birds.”
He returned to the mountain and lived in a cave. While living there, he took care of the cavern where the traveler was resting. At the time of her death, the villagers in those days discovered various miracles and they proclaimed them, without thoroughly understanding.
“It’s a miracle,” they said as they had said before.

To Micah, On the Removal of Your Appendix

2007-11-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

~ Susanna Childress

Which, of all the names of our human story—

gorgeous as the sound of Goethe—will prick

like a vaccination the whole sweet mess of your hitherto

undaunted body? You, little historian, sleeping

the heavy slumber of the great black bear

in December, my dear and only brother, who

shall call to you? Not Napoleon or Stonewall Jackson,

not Thucydides or Heraclitis, not Martin Luther,

not Meriwether Lewis. Not Frederick Douglas,

not precious Nathan Hale. O no, not you, Ronald

Reagan. Come, Mechtild of Magdeburg, say

How God Comes to the Soul, descending

on the beloved as dew on a flower, as even

dew on the open palm of a flower.

Mother as Water-Damaged Book

2007-11-15T08:20:00.001-08:00

~ Susanna Childress

When the rains came late in October, angry

as a muzzled dog, seven boxes of my books

were ruined. Mother told me at Thanksgiving

after I’d found Thoreau, Nabokov, Joyce

Carol Oates belly up on the washer, I was

drying them out for you, she said, and a great feral

weight slipped from her eyes, rolled helplessly

like cobble into a stream, to her knuckles

bending and scurrying over hundreds

of marred pages. Without warning, the entire

basement was covered in open books, Sappho

propped on the blender box, Midnight’s Children

like a tentative palm on the old VCR,

Norton Anthologies and periodicals lined

the 2x4 planks at the window. When I started

to cry, my own fingers uncertain how to touch

the Leaves of Grass I’d marked up in college,

Dr. Marj Elder having lent 48 years to the green ink

of my marginalia, my mother, also, began to cry.

She led me upstairs, where she pulled from under

her bed the most substantive volumes: Moby Dick,

my autographed Gwendolyn Brooks, a thickly bound

Great Gatsby, the golden-edged Pocket Sonnets,

all of them halved and breathing, tended to

by my mother’s cautious culpability. I was afraid,

she said, I was waiting for the right time, she said. And then,

there in my hands, I was turning the dampened,

molding sheets of my mother, her bleak ubiety,

unable to recover the ironed-flat flick

of the chapter’s end, some delicate scrawl on papyrus.

The Ancient Noise of D'Etre

2007-11-15T08:17:00.000-08:00

~ Susanna Childress

Alexandre et Theodore sont beaux et intelligents.

Janine est plus jolie que Monique.

Monique est plus jolie que Bernadette.

Bernadette est plus jolie que Amandine.

—“Learning to Compare,” Beginner’s French

It’s this. Not the silence at dusk, plumes of an anhinga

stretched to dry, and a gator’s eggs, of which perhaps two

in a batch of sixty will make it, buried in a nest of river grass. When

has anything so pert as comparison messed with the copious world,

its mangled precedence, its closing vein: my book has no section

on learning to survive. For that, I’ll enunciate Je ne vois aucun taxi though

it might come out C’est un bel arbre. Somebody’s already sung that one

and I’m thinking alligator eggs—how temperatures engender—

though the parking lot song makes sense: on this river, men played banjo,

harmonica, kazoo, they sang of salamanders, egrets, blue mullet

they could or could not catch. So why is Janine prettier than Monique,

Monique prettier than Bernadette, Bernadette than Amandine. There sit

Alexander and Theodore, beautiful and intelligent, the bastards. To a gator,

everything is a predator the first three years of its life, even its father,

and what has a mother to do but hiss and smack her tail around

even if the babes are not in need of warmth, not like me, on the porch, this

Beginner’s French lit up with colors, fonts, superlatives. After the first three years,

it’s the alligator’s turn to be predator. Works just so, the ancient noise of d’etre,

like the striated, hollow bottom of the bald cypress: widgeons wade there,

far beneath the osprey. Here there’s such a thing, but no use for, any kind

of comparison: none more lovely, none more inane—just alive, just not.