M E Bronstein - [BCS284 S02] - Elegy of a Lanthornist (html)

by Elegy of a Lanthornist (html)

  Elegy of a Lanthornist

  By M.E. Bronstein

  Introduction to the Final Writings of I. Hayes-Reyna:

  In the aftermath of Isabel Hayes-Reyna’s tragic disappearance, my colleagues and I have chosen to publish the following selections from her journal, in the hope that subsequent scholarship will conduct the necessary work of separating her fanciful recollections from her more meaningful insights.[1]

  Hayes-Reyna’s contributions to the field of Lanthornese Studies are well known. Trained from an early age by her grandfather, the great Lanthornist Francis Hayes, she is widely recognized for applying a new critical lens (namely, an unusual reliance upon Lanthornese folklore and oral traditions) to the Elegy of the Lantern Poet, and her efforts have reshaped scholarly conversation about this most important text.

  Hayes-Reyna’s journal may come across as an odd specimen to some. It contains notes pertaining to her research as well as her daily activities, interweaving the Lantern Poet’s prose and verse with her own personal reminiscence. She even reenacts, after a fashion, the Lantern Poet’s obsession with the beautiful Damma Lundzolin, also known as Lady Firefly.

  We have attempted to provide sufficient commentary to separate fact from fabrication (or, I ought perhaps to say, memory from the embroideries of imagination). Nevertheless, we hope that the reader will remain vigilant while sorting through Hayes-Reyna’s past. One may easily wander astray—just as, it would seem, Hayes-Reyna did herself.

  Septimana I, dies iv:

  It is now twenty-five years to the day since my grandfather gave me my locket. And so I have been thinking of lantern jewels.

  Once, these glass ornaments—shaped like butterflies, blossoms, songbirds—decorated necks and wrists and glowed throughout Lanthorna. I always think of one of the Lantern Poet’s earlier descriptions of Damma Lundzolin’s lantern jewel, shaped like a firefly:

  A firefly of glass shimmers and flies,

  Hovering sweetly by my lady’s throat.

  It shines in the glow cast by her eyes—

  And I envy this jewel its fair host.[2]

  (Ballad III.1-4)

  I was very young when I first visited Damma Lundzolin’s sepulcher and heard the story of the Lantern Poet’s love for her and how he penned the Elegy in her honor. Perhaps I wanted to be like her, back then—or like the Lantern Poet, who worshipped her. I gathered flowers in my grandfather’s garden and pretended they were made of crystal and full of brilliance. I begged for a lantern jewel of my own: a glass rose.

  My grandfather told me there were no more lantern jewels. “But here is the next best thing,” he said, and he gave me a locket containing a couple of oblong shards of old Lanthornese glass, so gray and translucent they resembled solidified fog. [3]

  I remember disappointment. The locket and its dull gray sheen seemed too unlike the glowing flower I had asked for. But over the years I have become fond of this gift, and I have rarely taken it off since my childhood. This locket marked me as a budding Lanthornist at a very early age. It is to blame, at least in part, for all the time I have spent chasing the light of Damma Lundzolin, the radiant Lady Firefly.

  S. II, d. v:

  Somehow, it always rains whenever I return to the Lantern Isle—or a fog fills the air that feels rather like rain, as pinpricks of moisture brush against my skin. My grandfather has proposed that the heady kind of glitter that fills the space between the sunlight and mist may have had something to do with the multitude of mystical visions once so commonly reported throughout Lanthorna.[4]

  Whenever I come back to the Lantern Isle, I often have the impression that I am walking among ghosts of my past. When I pass by my reflection in a window, I glimpse myself as a child, chasing fireflies in the bosquets after dusk. When I wander through the old market square, where the fountain full of cavorting dolphins and gods in bronze gurgles, I half-see a rippled image of myself as an adolescent, perched upon the fountain’s rim while my grandfather leans nearby; he points out a covert caricature of the sculptor’s stingy patron in a dolphin’s snarl. I can almost hear our laughter echoing through the water.[5]

  Not so much has changed. He still tends to direct my attention in much the same way. This has always pleased me—having such unique access to the most secret corners of his knowledge.

  I’ve been looking forward to seeing him again.

  As I arrive at his home, the gardener is trying to tame his yard, singing an old Lanthornese lullaby to the weeds. I nod to her and enter the house. It is dark and always smells faintly of petrichor, no matter the weather. My grandfather ushers me into the living room, where he has arranged a plate of bread, cheese, marmalade. There is a bottle of Muscadet on the table beside two ornate glasses, imitations of old Lanthornese goblets: globes of crystal cut in half, cradled in calyxes of silver.

  We chat for a little while. I begin to talk about my new project. I am working on the Elegy’s unique treatment of time and memory, the Lantern Poet’s manner of gathering fragments of his past. (Sometimes I think of the Lantern Poet as a child gathering sea glass on the beach, dropping different pieces of vitreous memory into a jar.) I have become more curious lately about the muddled chronology of his recollections of Lady Firefly.

  My grandfather asks if I have started writing anything down.

  “Yes,” I say, and I pull some of my notes out of my bag and hand them to him. He puts on his glasses and balances my papers on his knee, frowning.

  “Hmm.”

  “Hmm?”

  He takes his time, peels aside one leaf after another. I wait. And then, once he has turned the final page, he shrugs. “Seems a little lackluster,” he says. “There are more compelling questions in Lanthornese Studies, I think. You can do better than this.”

  Do better? I am striving after something—I am trying to find a woman who has been swallowed up, obscured by the folds of the Elegy. When your mission is to exhume someone, can you do so well or poorly? I would think that either you succeed or you do not.

  But if he thinks I can do better, perhaps I can.

  “...if it were me, contemplating traces of Damma Lundzolin, I would look elsewhere. I would not attempt to tease some sense of her biographical reality out of the Elegy. Rather, I would look for remnants of her in Lanthornese glass.”[6]

  While my grandfather speaks, I hear faraway music. The gardener’s song, drifting in through the open window.

  “Pardon?”

  He repeats himself, referring to the problems that have preoccupied him most throughout his career as a Lanthornist. I usually like this part; I like picking up puzzles that retirement has forced my grandfather to abandon.

  But something about that song outside is making it more difficult than usual to concentrate on the pieces he is trying to hand to me.

  My grandfather arranges a pile of books and papers and entrusts them to my open arms. He hopes these things will help me.

  As I leave, I pass by the gardener; she is singing as she weeds. I recognize her tune now: an old Lanthornese lullaby about a lazy bee who neglects to prepare honey for his hive. Come winter, he is starving. But then he happens across a reflection of a flower, a memory of summertime imprinted upon ice. He is able to light upon the blossom and bring nectar back to the hive, and so he manages to acquire “yesterday’s forgotten honey”: ”miaegl deyer oblaed,” sings the gardener.

  My thought flickers back to the windows, the fountain full of my past.

  Hayes-Reyna on Lanthornese Lullabies:

  Shortly after penning the above journal entry, Hayes-Reyna presented and went on
to publish her now famous (or infamous) paper concerning Lanthornese light and lullabies. One of the more frequently cited sections presents an unusual argument:

  We are all, of course, ultimately reliant upon the changing light as a means of tracking time’s passage. What does one do, then, in a place surrounded by water, full of glass and metals, consequently dotted by flakes of dancing light and luminous shadows? Well, it would appear that one develops rather peculiar theories concerning the link between light and time. Throughout the Lantern Isle, it is widely believed that just as one can refract and reflect light, one can likewise preserve pieces of the past in a reflection. And so lanterns and lantern jewels continue to reflect the sun well after it has set. And likewise, the bee in the lullaby is able to collect nectar from a reflected flower, a remnant of summer that lingers in water and light.

  We ought to recall that the Lantern Poet often represents himself as a bee. And like the bee in the lullaby, he occupies himself collecting fragments of lost time.[7]

  The phenomenon that Hayes-Reyna describes is not unlike the principle underpinning pilgrim mirrors, a development of Gutenberg’s over a century after the Lantern Poet’s life. Mirrors were sold to pilgrims on their routes to holy sites, which they would bring into shrines in an effort to capture the light of a given altarpiece or relic to take back home with them. (Whether or not Gutenberg would have encountered any Lanthornese glass in the course of developing this project remains unknown.) Some have complained that Hayes-Reyna’s research renders phenomena associated with sacred art and light too mundane and quotidian. All the people of Lanthorna thus become like pilgrims, and the light of an earthly woman like Damma Lundzolin vies with that of saints.[8] Hayes-Reyna, however, seems not to have viewed such conflation as problematic.

  She evidently considered this research a preparatory kind of labor, a tool that would help her to unlock a window into the historicity of Damma Lundzolin.

  S. VII, d. iv:

  My grandfather has spoken before about likenesses between Lanthorna—both the island and the city—and the Lantern Poet’s own verses; all have been compared to broken glass.[9] The city contains its own shards of the Elegy: the Lantern Poet’s memories and traces of his verses, scattered in various places, preserved in glass and stone. That is something I have always loved about Lanthornese Studies: that it is impossible to stay restricted to the archives; you have to roam Lanthorna.

  And so I have decided to hunt down pieces of Lanthornese glass, aided by Silber’s catalogue. I already know of a handful of chapels, less impressive today than they once were. Their exteriors are all covered up by scaffolding to protect what remains of their windows.[10] They shine with the remains of the morning rain, and the occasional tarp shivers forlornly in the wind.

  I go inside one ruined chapel after another, and a chill washes around me. Everything is silent, save for the vague echo of my footfalls. Glittering teeth—the edges of old windows—wink through the dark. All gray and gold.

  When I was a girl, I chased fireflies among the trees between these chapels. When the Lantern Poet was alive, he chased the light of his own Firefly. Perhaps the glass contains some hint, some memory, of his search, and I can shadow his footsteps again—find him finding her.

  I do not know how else to begin, so I start by hunting down bees, etched into the corners of a few scattered windows. I read these little symbols in the glass as the Lantern Poet’s signature, signs of his one-time presence. I happen upon one, then another. A trail of glass breadcrumbs. I follow—from chapel to chapel, window to window.

  S. VIII, d. ii:

  I have passed days like this, following and losing the trail of glass bees. This may sound a tedious kind of labor, but in truth I am enjoying it. I am channeling my girlhood self, chasing fireflies, tantalized by the tell-tale golden flicker as the waning sunlight strikes against silver stain.

  Then—the pattern breaks. I find something new.

  A shadow falls across the window I am studying. And I think I glimpse—though later I will trust myself less; that is why I must write this down—a robed figure reflected across the shining panes, his shadow interrupting the light.[11] He holds up a length of cloth—a veil?—covering something.

  I have been waiting for something like this—a glimpse of the reflected Poet like a bee’s image preserved in water.

  And yet—something about this apparition unnerves me. I start backwards. When I approach the window again, the man, the veil—they vanish. I cannot tell whether the Poet’s shade means to give me a clue or hide something from me. But whatever his intentions, the window does yield up a clue after all.

  As I come closer, I glimpse a hole in the glass, shaped rather like an insect with outstretched wings.

  Various such tiny images have been knocked out of the old windows by thieves over the years. At first I take the gap that faces me for the absence left by yet another stolen glass bee, but the glow that radiates through the surrounding glass is different. A greenish-yellow, unearthly light.

  My pulse hiccups. As I trace the gap, my fingertips waver.

  I open my locket, hold it up near the hole in the window, and its misty gray glass winks back at me. The dimensions match perfectly. I have never before recognized my pieces of old Lanthorna as glass wings, fallen from Damma Lundzolin’s own icon.[12] A portrait of a sort. This new knowledge thrills through me—I have had a sort of firefly jewel with me this whole time. It has been with me nearly all my life.

  S. VIII, d. iii:

  I remember the draft of an article my grandfather gave me on the stained glass of old Lanthorna. I rifle through its pages in my apartment as a storm begins to clot the air outside with humid shadows.[13]

  The Lantern Poet’s descriptions of Lanthorna’s stained glass windows in grisaille are striking; all through the night one could detect “an amber blush upon a maiden’s cheek / a honeyed hint of gold in her shadow” (Ballad X.2-3). He describes such windows, all silver and gold, as full of storms and sunlight. Throughout the Elegy, contemplating such glass grants the Lantern Poet a unique insight into the world around him...

  A murmur of thunder interrupts my reading. The raindrops against the windowpane sound like a hand, tapping upon the glass, calling me to attention. There is something important here.

  ...I would disagree with Silber’s claim that the windows served as “spectacles” of a sort, informing the Lantern Poet’s vision. We must recall that corrective lenses were hardly a common commodity during this period. Scribes could rely upon quartz reading stones, but such glass as one could find in old Lanthorna would generally have had a tendency to distort rather than clarify. That is, Lanthornese metal and glass became a window for the Lantern Poet into a new world of shifting light, rather than a means of understanding the world as we know it...

  Lenses. Windows. I open my locket. The two fragments of gray glass slotted into each compartment gleam in the dim.

  I have a theory. After Lanthornese glass died out, I think we lost the trick for using reflections to see through history. We catch wayward glimpses, since all the air of the Lantern Isle is redolent with fragments of memory—the past flitting through its fountains, its morning fog. But Lanthornese glass is particularly adept at capturing these whispers of time, and it takes extensive acquaintance with these unique filters to be able to see through Lanthorna properly.

  And I have a pair of glass wings. I have always worn them close to my heart, and I have spent ample time gazing into them. Indeed, for years and years these pieces of old Lanthorna have come to infect my vision, without my even realizing it.

  I go to the window, glass wings in hand. The dark silhouettes of trees tremble as the wind picks up. Masses of ashen cloud veil the once-pale sky.[14]

  A flash of lightning scars the air, and in that moment of eerie light, there are phantom figures in clothes that do not belong to this era, wandering the streets below.

  A glimmer of Lanthorna’s past.

  And I can see the vague sha
dow or reflection—of a robed figure whom I now recognize—down in the street below. He is holding a basketful of luminous blossoms. He is hurrying along furtively, glancing over his shoulder. And he stops before a doorway, lays his basket down, then kneels with reverence, as though offering a gift to a saint or idol.

  Hayes-Reyna’s Commentary upon the Elegy:

  The subsequent pages in Hayes-Reyna’s journal contain transcriptions of three selections from the Elegy (two prose passages and a fragment of a ballad) as well as her annotations. Her own remarks are strange but may be of potential scholarly interest (hence our decision to publish them here), as they speak to Hayes-Reyna’s ever-evolving understanding of the bee as the Lantern Poet’s symbol.

  The first passage concerns the Lantern Poet’s attempt to win Damma Lundzolin’s favor by offering lantern jewels to her:

  I cannot sleep; my dreams are always full of fireflies, and their light awakens me. Since I cannot sleep, I have gone looking for gifts for my lady. I have been to the markets, found the finest glass, the finest lantern jewels the city has to offer: glass lavender, glass orange blossoms, glass sunflowers. All these brittle blooms have such a delicate pallor, as though crafted from moonlight. I will leave them in a basket before her door, and I know that when she sees them, she will understand that they are a gift from me.

  I have passed by countless times. My basket of glass flowers is still there.

  I have passed by again and found a broken crystal petal lying upon the earth, its light dying.

  (Prose XLIX. 1-8)

  Hayes-Reyna’s marginal notes around these excerpts reflect a shift in her assessment of the significance of the bee and his preserved flowers. In this case, she appears to read the Lantern Poet’s manipulation of these symbols as an effort to ensnare the attention of Lady Firefly; for example, see the following comments upon the trio of flowers: “lavender, orange blossoms, sunflowers”:

  Common around apiaries. (In the lullaby it’s usually a sunflower, though some variants include orange blossoms.) The bee brings his mistress an offering that will one day yield honey, in the hope of enticing her.