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

by Elegy of a Lanthornist (html)

  But it doesn’t work.

  In the next passage that Hayes-Reyna excerpts from the Elegy, the Lantern Poet recounts a dreamed encounter with a more compliant Damma Lundzolin:

  Just as I have given up all hope, she graces me with a vision:

  She appears before me, and she is made of glass but full of fire, just like the jewels I once acquired for her. Shining crystal wings extend from her shoulders—the wings of a firefly. Taller than me by a head, she leans down, wings full of light, and she whispers:

  “If you wish to be my servant, you must write of my beauty. You must try to capture my light.”

  “But that is impossible,” I answer.

  She frowns and says, “You must try. Capture my light, before it goes out.”

  (Prose LX. 1-7)

  The connection between this passage and the previous one is not immediately clear, but the link in Hayes-Reyna’s mind seems to lie in a certain “stickiness” (for lack of a better word) to the Lantern Poet’s language—i.e., his recurring interest in images stuck in viscous time: preserved flowers, honey as a kind of snare, his efforts to “capture” the light of Lady Firefly. In her commentary on the following page, Hayes-Reyna critiques her own prior readings of the text:

  Something is changing.

  When I first began to delve into Lanthornese Studies I loved this part; I related to the Lantern Poet’s sehnsucht, epitomized by his visions of Damma Lundzolin, his Lady Firefly. But now, reading this episode again makes me—I don’t know how else to describe this—faintly dizzy. Ill. Teetering at the edge of something alluring, or is it awful? I cannot help but think about the veil I glimpsed upon the window. Was he—is he—hiding something from me?

  I think the Lantern Poet is hiding a clue from me, a secret. But what? I cannot read the text in the way I used to, as Damma Lundzolin’s command to her servant to pen the Elegy in her honor. I can hear the Lantern Poet’s own voice echoing in the background, distorting his Firefly’s message. Making her say what he wants her to say.

  Finally, Hayes-Reyna includes a fragment from one of the Lantern Poet’s mourning ballads, penned shortly after Damma Lundzolin’s death:

  Although the storm has left, erased by dawn,

  I cannot see the rising light of day.

  My light is lost, my darling beacon gone,

  Her windows are dark, her lanterns away.

  I must appease her shade without delay;

  All my dreams resound with her desire:

  “Capture my light,” she prays, and I obey.

  And so shall I ever guard her fire.

  (Ballad LXX. 1-7)

  This fragment of poetry is unadorned by Hayes-Reyna’s marginal commentary save for one isolated question that lies at the bottom of the page:

  Oh Lord—what did you do?

  S. IX, d. i:

  I visit my grandfather again. We talk about my reading. We talk about lantern jewels. I reminisce about the glass roses I craved as a young girl.

  I pull my locket out from beneath my collar.

  “May I ask—why did you give this to me?”

  My grandfather pauses, considering. He reaches for a jar of honey on the table.

  “A gift from one Lanthornist in the family to the next,” he says. “You know that. The pieces of glass in that locket are authentic remnants of—”

  “You realize it has—” I stop.

  “It has what?”

  “The same properties that once made Lanthornese glass famous,” I mutter.

  My grandfather stirs his tea for a moment, then rambles about various theories concerning the legendary brilliance of old Lanthorna: bioluminescent materials washed up from the sea, radiant crystals extracted from alchemical experiments gone awry, highly reflective gilding.

  In short, he refuses to acknowledge that he gave me this gift, this unique insight into Lanthorna, intentionally. So that I would see things that none other had. Including him.

  I study him. Time has etched such a fine network of lines across his face that he half-reminds me of a pane of scratched glass. I can almost imagine the Lantern Poet engraving upon him with a diamond burr, rewriting him. I do not like being able to see time wear away someone who has shaped so much of me, who has engraved my features and life in turn, passing on to me the same signs of weariness.

  When I rise to depart, my grandfather says, “You have always had the potential to be brilliant, my child. Just be careful not to get lost in daydreams or sentiment. These things are the greatest miaegl-dol[15] of them all.”

  I promise my grandfather that I will not let any such miaegl, any honey, distract me from my research. And as I leave, I hope that he will forgive me for not keeping my promise.

  S. IX, d. iii:

  Equipped with my wings of stained glass, I go to the Archives, hunting for gaps in the text, erasures the Lantern Poet may not have wanted his readers to peer past. My blood trembles at my wrist and throat—always a signal that the trail I’m on is a meaningful one; I am getting close.

  I have ordered the oldest manuscript (an autograph copy, many suppose, given its age and the scribe’s untidy hand[16]) so that I can study the end of the Elegy—the bane of every Lanthornist’s existence, with its missing chunks of text. Perhaps, with the help of my glass, I can discern whatever the Lantern Poet sought fit to excise from this very parchment.

  A couple of lines from Colfox’s translation come to me, unbidden: “These words are... / My lonely penance, my lovely fetters / Learn from me, reader, and be my better.”

  While I agree with many of my colleagues that “fetters” is a poor rendering of miaegl-dol—“poisonous honey,” to lure and kill pests—I am taken with the mistranslation. That is not to say I think “fetters” a better description of the Poet’s own feeling of bittersweet entrapment. Rather, I think of the reader. As my grandfather once argued, the suppressed text leaves the reader feeling trapped as well; its erasures become oppressive.[17]

  But something in the text resists me. It is as though the Lantern Poet is reaching out to push me away. Does something of his spirit cling to the reflective remnants of gilding?

  I nearly drop the manuscript. A stray breeze wanders through the library, although all the windows are closed, as always, and the folios before me flutter, taking me away from the broken ending. I hold down the section I need with weights. The quivering pulse at my wrist makes me feel for a moment as though there is an insect trapped beneath my skin, its wings trembling as it struggles to find a way out. I do not pick up my magnifying glass to inspect the text’s erasures, as so many scholars have before me to no avail. Instead, I click the catch of my locket and let it fall open.

  My glass wings hover above the book while I pretend to study an initial.

  Though I do not imagine that anything I have done will prove remarkable to other patrons, I glance around the library, at rows and rows of serene and weary readers at their desks; they are all poring over vast tomes, compact books of hours, folders full of charters—distracted by their own work, as always.

  I sit back down and peer into my locket. And I find a few lost, erased words, sealed in reflected light:

  Oustrent mindamm’almang nismorg.[18]

  Where my lady lies her soul never dies.

  S. IX, d. iv:

  And so I return to Damma Lundzolin’s sepulcher, a space I used to love as a girl, when I felt drawn by the romance of her death.

  The exterior is covered in colorful mosaics—largely chipped away by time, but one can still see broken glass patterns embedded in its walls: colorful tesserae, whorls of petal and leaf, the occasional golden bee or firefly fluttering from one full blossom to the next. The mosaics continue inside, where they glitter more darkly.

  The shadows and quiet weigh upon me.

  A stone slab sits in the center of the room. The faint profile of a sleeping woman carved on top of it suggests a vague portrait of Lady Firefly. A sculpted hound lies curled up at her feet, defending her.

  On
e lone light illuminates these things: a lantern, one of a very few remaining examples of the old lanterns, full of the dim reminiscence of a lost era’s sun. It is a pretty object, wrapped in acanthus fronds of iron, and across its panes of glass calligraphic lines of mercury—reflective as mirrors—spell out lines from the Elegy.

  I search all around—hoping to find, I don’t know what. I open up my locket and stare at my pieces of old Lanthorna, training my gaze through glass wings so that I will see properly. Then I contemplate the sepulcher anew.

  “Where are you?” I ask.

  A light pulses in response from the lantern. It hurts a little, prickles and burns against my eyes. For a moment, I have to look away.

  Then I stare upward. And there seems to be a firefly dancing and blinking inside the lantern. The creature comes to a stop, perches against a pane of glass, and then the whole sepulcher brightens—and I see a strange radiance, a woman’s luminous eyes glowing through the glass, framed by the shimmer of script.[19]

  I should be thrilled. This should be thrilling.

  But instead, there is pain. It’s like a contained scream, building up, filling everything—my head, the space around me—and the dark is full of the tremor of contained sound, stifled. I don’t know whether the unuttered scream is hers or mine.

  The fetters—the miaegl-dol—what did the Lantern Poet mean? Did he mean that he had been ensnared by poisonous honey himself? Or did he try to capture someone else—to preserve a memory of her, his Lady Firefly?

  The contained scream still hums around me.

  I hold out my locket for her, offering her a doorway out of the lantern, into me. I can feel her peering down, considering my offering. Better to move from one trap to another than to stay trapped in the lantern forever.

  And so I become a bee myself, like the one in the lullaby. This is how I gather up Damma Lundzolin’s light, her soul, like nectar to return to the hive.

  As she flutters against my chest, near my heart, inscribed in the panes of glass within my locket, I can hear her. Her voice resounds through me. That eases the pain a little. Some small release.

  She has come home. Now she inhabits a portrait of her own wings.

  S. XII, d. v:

  A voice that has existed so long in absence will tend to grow very heavy. I have written this down in an effort to alleviate my burden, offering her—I don’t know—an escape, or a mouthpiece. But I am not sure that paper and ink are enough for her, a sufficient means of emerging.

  The locket is heavy. Her light is too bright. Is this the puzzle my grandfather feared I would become stuck in? Have I become caught in the quicksilver honey that snagged Lady Firefly out of time?

  Whoever you are, if anyone ever reads this—I wonder, would you take her? At least try, for a little while?

  Sometimes I am afraid—that soon, she will become too much for me to handle alone.

  Deciphering Hayes-Reyna’s Final Remarks:

  We are not certain what to make of the final pages of Hayes-Reyna’s journal, which contain several crossed-out passages written in a strange voice that drifts in and out of Old Lanthornese. But a frequent refrain is often legible: lusza-me, lusza-me. “Let me out, let me out.” We have attempted to edit one of the more intelligible sections:

  The burning sickness ate her alive for days and days, made her feel as though her skin ought to glow like a livid coal as the fever burned through her blood.

  And then the strange Poet forced his way into her chambers, stood beside her deathbed.

  He said he could save her, could capture at the very least some piece of her. He held a lantern, held it aloft like a misplaced sun lighting the dark and said he could preserve her soul in light and poetry as though in amber, said he could put her into shining lines of verse, inscribe her into the lantern.

  And she considered it. She knew she shouldn’t but she did. But then she said no no no. She wanted the burning to go away; she did not want her light to be preserved, to never end.

  He did not listen.

  Now you must listen, as I am listening. I can hear her, and she is screaming:

  I beg of you listen help me hear me

  let me out.

  * * *

  [1] We are referring to the volume in question as a “journal” for lack of a better term, as Hayes-Reyna seems to have been preparing this text for some manner of publication. Near the end of the document, she addresses an unknown reader. Certain critics have suggested that this text may in fact have been intended as a rewriting of the Elegy of the Lantern Poet for a current audience. In particular, see Choucaz, C., “Isabel Hayes-Reyna’s Autofictions,” in The Firefly’s Reception (New Delft: Clepsydra Impr., ann. cxi), 72-105. Choucaz points out that the journal may have been written in the present tense in an effort to imitate the Elegy and the “temporal slipperiness” of the Lantern Poet’s use of present tense constructions to describe past events (104-5).

  [2] In the interest of accessibility to a general audience, we have chosen to replace the text of Hayes-Reyna’s excerpts from the Elegy with Everett Colfox’s translation; for all of its admittedly numerous flaws, it remains the standard in the field. Any curious readers who wish to study the Elegy’s original language are encouraged to consult Francis Hayes’s edition. (Though our field has endured its share of derision—due, in large part, to Rabelais’s mockery of the lovely language of the Lantern Isle—we assure the reader that the text’s original language is a treasure indeed.)

  [3] Hayes-Reyna apparently considered this locket, given to her by her grandfather, the great Lanthornist Francis Hayes, an object of considerable symbolic import. She conflates it somewhat with lantern jewels of old. While her conviction that the locket contains genuine fragments of old Lanthornese glass is intriguing, it seems likelier that her grandfather made such fanciful claims only as a means of encouraging her interest in Lanthorna’s past. For a comprehensive catalogue of all surviving pieces of Lanthornese glass currently recognized, see Silber, G., Glassware of the Lantern Isle (New Delft: Clepsydra Impr., ann. xc).

  [4] Hayes-Reyna would in fact go on to write a rebuttal to the famous article of her grandfather’s in question. See Hayes, F., “The Lanthornese Mystics and ‘Visions’ in Fog,” Tesserae 28, no. 2 (ann. lxxix): 13-23; and Hayes-Reyna, I., “Visions in Glass and Silver: Lanthornese Artisans and Mystical Craftsmanship,” act. XXIIIe colloque intl. du Corp. lithostrot., ed. L. Gallé (ann. cii): 37-45. In this article, Hayes-Reyna proposes that rather than explaining away mystical phenomena as the product of the island’s natural weather patterns, Lanthornists ought to pay more attention to local glass and metalwork and the demonstrable Lanthornese effort to “manufacture” the stuff of visions.

  [5] In this entry, Hayes-Reyna appears to slip between metaphor and dream. Whether she actually means for her reader to trust in the truth of these “visions” remains unclear. My colleagues and I believe that this passage ought to be read as an idiosyncratic example of Hayes-Reyna’s habit of projecting her own reminiscence onto Lanthorna itself. (We note that the Lantern Poet demonstrates a more extreme version of the same tendency, often perceiving reflections of Damma Lundzolin in water and glass, years after her death.)

  [6] Hayes likely refers to a stained glass “portrait” of Damma Lundzolin, which the Lantern Poet mentions frequently throughout the Elegy. Rather than a literal likeness of her, it is generally presumed to have been a depiction of a maiden in a stained glass window, which the Lantern Poet may have treated as a sort of proxy for his lady love. Worshipping the picture in glass would have become a means of pretending closeness with his Lady Firefly. However, scholars have been unable to identify the precise window and image in question.

  [7] For the full text of this paper, see Hayes-Reyna, I., “The Bee and the Flower: Lanthornese Lullabies and the Lantern Poet’s Apian Avatar,” in Proc. Thirty-Second Intl. Cong. Lanthornese Stud., ed. C Choucaz (Lanthorna: UniLanth Press, ann. ci), 117-34.

  [8] In particular, see Lenz, A., “S
acred and Mundane Light: Correcting Against the (de)Sacralization of the Past in Lanthornese Studies,” in Proc. Forty-Third Intl. Cong. Lanthornese Stud., ed. C. Choucaz (Lanthorna: UniLanth Press, ann. cxii), 93-107. Lenz goes so far as to declare Hayes-Reyna’s disappearance an elaborate stunt, a part of her ongoing effort to “sacralize” and rewrite both herself and Damma Lundzolin as “martyrs” (106).

  [9] Hayes-Reyna is likely referring to the following remarks in Hayes, F., The Lantern Poet and His Isle (New Delft: Clepsydra Impr., ann. lxxii), 14: “That we have named him after his Isle is not inappropriate; there are ways in which the Lantern Poet’s poetry resembles his home. Lanthorna is an ostentatious tangle. From above, one would think some lackadaisical god had thrown a stone at a pane of glass and then modeled the city’s streets after the resultant cobweb of cracks. So, too, is the Lantern Poet’s oeuvre chipped and fractured all over. There is a fragmentary quality, even to the Lantern Poet’s most complete verses, which seem to break as one reads them—as though he has mishandled them, dropped them while composing.”

  [10] Several of the old windows have been lost between wars, revolutions, disasters, and a most unfortunate increasing tendency toward hooliganism and defacement of national treasures throughout Lanthorna.

  [11] Many of these ruined chapels and pavilions lie in bosquets at the edge of the city and are surrounded by old trees and ivy. Hayes-Reyna may be rather creatively re-imagining the shadow cast by a willow upon one of the more notable chapels. Fronds wavering across glass, producing shadows and dappled light, might create the visual effect Hayes-Reyna describes.

  [12] The insect-shaped gap in the glass that Hayes-Reyna mentions is indeed documented in Silber’s catalogue (see p. 112). However, it matches a glass bee currently in the keeping of the Archives. As Hayes-Reyna herself notes, such glass bees are quite numerous throughout Lanthorna.