“Would you like some spare change?”
“Would you be averse to accepting a gift from a stranger, whom you will never see again, but who nevertheless wants you to be able to see the truth of the matter at hand?”
“I’m working for food and for you. Take this.”
“I am summertime. This is a plum.”
And so on. Unfortunately, she was shunned. It turned out to be far easier to beg for money until someone chose to help her, than it was to give away money to recipients she chose herself. Almost no one would accept anything from her. Those who did prospered strangely. And, on the chance that more of those who want a strange chance would come along, she continued her work on the street. One day, a green-eyed, uncompromising, adventurous, quiet, amorous man stopped and listened to her thoughtfully. He took the coins she offered. He was an engineer from Brazil who designed microprocessors and did the samba, and he asked if he might take her home to South America and marry her. She asked if they might do the samba right there in the street and go to dinner together and perhaps tomorrow morning think about marrying. So did their promising conversation begin.
Thus she was led to the strange conclusion that, contrary to what is promulgated as common sense, many of us are not selfish, but have a capacity for generosity. Unfortunately, it is not enough, not nearly enough, to be generous. It is the merest beginning. The next step is far more difficult: the generous must find a way to recognize and accept the good fortune presented to them every day. So many fail to give the gifts they have because they cannot benefit from the gifts they are offered.
Or, as she put it: if you won’t accept small change, there’s no way you’ll be able to afford paradise.
Rainy cottage—After lovemaking The scent of jasmine tea.
—IKUYO YOSHIMURA
Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do, Not light them for themselves.
—SHAKESPEARE
The candle is not there to illuminate itself.
—NAWAB JAN-FISHAN KHAN (19TH C)
Had I not seen the sun I could have born the shade But light a newer wilderness My wilderness has made.
—EMILY DICKINSON
PART IV
I have never known a woman as taciturn as the teller of this story. She is the most watchful, perhaps the most mindful, person I have ever known. She lives on an island in a lake in the Adirondacks and loves Sappho, Boccaccio, and Camus.
THE SILENT WOMAN
Once there was a woman who talked a great deal. She felt obliged to do so, because her opinions about herself, her life, and the world needed to be sustained by talk. It was as if her innermost motivations and dearest principles were held in everything she said—in her pitch of voice and selection of words, the accompanying emphasis of hands, the telling changes of her face. No matter how abbreviated the exchange of words, no matter what subject was brought forth, no matter what the overall situation, this woman’s talk held everything about her life.
In this, of course, she was just like many men and women.
At a certain point in her years, however, our talker took on another task, the perfection of her silence. She found that her silence, which had always been around, had a range of meaning and subtlety overpowering that of words; and so she sensed new powers, which, if she could develop in herself, would permit her to be of better service to her cohorts.
This project was difficult, however, because just as each word has a sound and significance, and is subject to rules of grammar and usage, so each silence is different from another, has its own properties, and is subject to the rules of an invisible, beautiful grammar—call it an earthly grammar, since our planet uses no words to give forth its flourishing show.
First she noticed that each silence had a particular shape, and was meant to fit, like a puzzle piece, into a given situation. Then, of course, the force of the silence had to be calibrated, because one too powerful for a given conversation could press upon those present and undermine the phrases which they did speak. Next, she learned that each silence had a certain internal color; and so its hue, brightness, and tone had to be arranged to harmonize properly with the events at hand—to take its place, as it were, within the whole painting of the conversation. Our friend worked on all these fronts, so that the shape, force, and color of a given silence would be consistent with the best hopes—even with the unknown hopes—of those in her company.
After a time, she became valued for her capacity to use silence, along with words, to help people to see, in tranquility, the way forward they needed most; or, alternatively, to see themselves for the dear, ridiculous people they really were. Her provision of the most useful silence was not always obvious to those she helped, because they were used to sustaining their world with talk, rather than with the silent understanding that brought to words a necessary enrichment and power.
Our friend, though, no longer looked to talk for sustenance, for she knew that real language was not of words, but used words. And so her own talk was no longer a personal, uncontrollable revelation, but, at last, had come now to be founded upon the more obvious, comprehensive silence—the silence of the movement of earth through space. This is, of course, the model for the movement of love in darkness, and for the movement of meaning through a sentence. All of which will come clear to the reader as soon as this story, learning at last from its own narrative, finds its way to a necessary silence—its own.
The great European city Barcelona has a reputation for wealth and eccentricity, for beauty and anarchy. It is a city that is changed, now and then, profoundly and forever, by the concentrated work of a few people. I heard this story in a Cuban restaurant near the cathedral of Santa Maria del Mar, in the neighborhood of La Ribera.
A NUN AND HER LOVING
I am the granddaughter of a nun, and so I am able to tell you part of the secret history of the nineteenth century. You may not believe me. But I am old, and I want to die with one less secret. The sweep of events, as usually described, is meant to deceive us. The real history of the world—what really happened—is mostly secret. Out of sight, beyond the trumpeting and vainglory, the strutting and disgust, the declarations of tribunals, the flourished signatures—beyond all this, within all this, real work is being done.
A few ideas—say, having schools for children, abolishing slavery, making nations, inventing the loom, making art and nature move together, perfecting a soul by means of beauty—a few ideas, which had been around for a while, are known to have taken on particular force in the nineteenth century. My grandmother was a nun in Spain, one of a special group of nuns in many countries (they all knew each other). These powerful women, with their blessings, dinners, private ceremonies, with their social presence and potent quiet influence, had a hand in many of the seemingly random encounters where such ideas and movements took form and had life in the world.
I can tell you how my grandmother played her part. First of all, she could read the souls of men, just by looking at their shadows. It’s lucky for her that she lived in a sunny climate, where it’s easier to examine shadows. In England, for example, her work would have taken much longer.
She read souls, so as to find from such reading just when someone quickened within, when he was most available to ideas, to hope, to beauty, to reality. And when she noted two men coming at the same time to the incendiary point when life rises within them like fireworks, then she would take action. She would bring such men together at just the moment when their ideas and energies might merge, lighting up decades, or centuries.
I give you merely one example. In 1878 in Barcelona, a businessman and an eccentric young architect were persuaded by her to visit, at the same hour of the day, a workshop in the city. She had spoken to both men privately. Both men had religious inclinations, and they listened always to her courteous and gentle suggestions. In fact, both of them loved her, but that is another story. So it was that, by her ministrations, yet, it would seem, by chance, the two men met on the appointed day, at the workshop.
The businessman was of astounding wealth. The young architect had almost no experience. He had designed some streetlamps that were never built; a florist stand and a urinal, also never built. His only completed projects were a display case for gloves and his own work desk. He had also designed his personal business card, even though he had no business.
The two men began a friendship that lasted nearly forty years. The businessman is Eusebi Güell, and the architect is Antoni Gaudí. Because of that meeting, they made buildings together that blessed and inspirited the history of Barcelona, and the history of Europe. They made a new marriage between the beauty of nature and the beauty we make as men and women. They showed us how playfulness may be sacred. They changed the way beauty may come forth among us; and now we cannot imagine the world without them.
I have all my grandmother’s letters from the two men. So I do not have to guess at the playfulness of their loving. Or at the way some paradise that is here with us played with them.
None of it would have happened without her. Think of her and her friends, in their international amusements, over so many centuries, with such anonymity. Do you think we would have a world left, without them? Even the shred of a world, without them?
In central Nevada there are still groups who go out to hunt big cats, with unpredictable results. I did not know, however, that they were quite this unpredictable. I heard the story in a bar, of course, in Ely, Nevada. Just to the east of this town there stands the 12,000-foot Mount Moriah, which has a long flat top called The Table, near where these hunters sought their prey, and their prey, them.
THE HUNT
Once there was a group of hunters who traveled into dry, rough country to hunt cougar. Now, the splendor of the cougar is well known: it is a tawny, spell-spinning animal whose grace of movement is a match for the legendary desert mountain ranges, ranges full of old stones and fresh mirage.
The three hunters made camp late at night in just such a wilderness range. The campfire burned low, stars wandered through the canyons, sagebrush grew up to the moon. In the morning the three checked their rifles and set out to hunt, separating as they went; each one followed his instincts about the location of the cougar. One of them, a woman, was known as a careful, quick-spirited hunter. She hiked over a saddle and into the thick patches of bitterbrush at the base of a sandstone ridge. The light was spare and clear. She went slowly. She felt strong.
Upon her emergence from the dry luxuriance of the bitterbrush, she found herself near a cliff and face-to-face with a mother cougar and her kittens. The mother, contrary to the stories we hear about cougars, showed neither hostility nor fear; and the woman, contrary to our expectations about hunters, did not raise her rifle. In fact, so forthright, perfect, and full of peace was the confrontation that our hunter by a straightforward and finely conceived operation of heaven felt her hands and feet widened to accommodate fur and pad and the crescent, powerful claws. Her back was inset with muscles so thick that they arched her body down to the ground, and she felt a strange concord with the beauties of the big desert. She felt her new stride, her constellation of teeth, her honey-colored eyes.
Now, to become suddenly a cougar is less moderate a change than many of us undergo in a course of our lives. But our hunter, somehow, understood the purposes it had.
Later during her day as a cougar, after stalking and killing a deer, she was spotted and fired on by one of her own hunting party; the bullet barely grazed her shoulder. That night, when she was a woman again, and had met her friends back at camp, the stories of the cougar that got away gave her as much amusement as the wound in her shoulder gave her pain.
When the trip was over, she returned to her job in the city; but she was not surprised to discover in her life another life, where there was other work to be done—when she was transformed again, and everything around her changed. The streets turned to canyon, dry wash, and rimrock, the windows burst with sage and mesquite; and she hunted to provide food for the kittens.
As she worked at her regular job, the pain in her shoulder always brought to mind what she had learned: that we must hunt day by day, year after year, with hope and care, without giving up, through every merciless change, no matter what the hardships and impossibilities—we must hunt what no one can ever kill.
These phrases and paragraphs are noted down directly from my conversations with a woman in the Basque country of Southern France. She has a marvelous garden, and as she gardened, she talked with me, in her contemplative way. I didn’t need to say much of anything. It was as if she were carrying on a conversation with my thoughts.
STATEMENTS SHE PLANTED, THAT GREW UP TO BE STORIES
As independence is to a cat, so are words to a good sentence.
The tree has learned, and with its knowledge has gained the capacity to give sweet fruit. Humans have learned; but often when they gain what their epoch calls knowledge, it does not bring any capacity to give love. As a result, knowledge and love are thought to be separate; hence our catastrophes.
So many catastrophes that the trees may stop giving fruit.
The heart is a thundercloud: sometimes lightning, sometimes showers, sometimes a clearing before the winds that blow from a world within this world.
Once it can have its clearing, it can, from then on, call forth any weather necessary.
Paradise is in the dirt anywhere, available once you wink and work in a certain way. Then it comes alive, and it is more than a place, more than reality; rather, the soil of reality, source of forms. This grounding of things, it is thoroughly and roughly alive, has senses of its own. Not earth, it is the way the earth watches us, so that we may be judged. Therefore it is natural to ask, what might be the expression on the face of paradise?
Quizzical. Amorous. Full of longing, rigor, hopefulness, independence. In that expression is the origin of all the come-hither looks given forever.
The military, which has played such a role in our history, is doomed. This is so because, in the long run, only metaphors grow out the barrel of a gun.
A story from Ireland, told, of course, in a pub over an Irish whiskey. The teller, in my company, I had never known to deliver more than a brief phrase. With no warning, very late at night, she began this tale in her raspy voice.
THE FASHIONABLE LADY AND HER JEWELS
Once upon a time a woman was walking along the streets of her village and stumbled over a big cobblestone that, unlike the many other cobbles she had fallen over, pivoted back like a little door. Revealed within was a shallow cavity jammed with a tattered, oil-stained mass of rags. Now our lady was curious as a young crow, and a scavenger of artful thrift and whimsy. She plucked the unsavory rags from that little den and found that they wrapped an emerald as large as her fist.
She was not easily surprised, and, more than that, not a person to be confused by the inexplicable and magnificent, so she tossed the emerald in a pocket and took it home. And a good thing, too, because she found at home in the mail a little package bearing no return address; and inside the package, a pair of rubies. A fine coincidence! she thought, for now the emerald will have companions. And she placed them on the table, not meaning, as she turned away, to knock over the sugar bowl.
I’m as clumsy as an animal in its winter fat, she thought; and, cursing and grousing merrily as she reached over to right the bowl, she saw the sugar grains gather and condense into pearls mischievously on the move across the table. And she commenced, in high frenzy and buffoonery, the struggle to keep them from rolling off to the far ends of the earth: around and around she darted, setting up books as a barrier, scooping up pearls, sweeping some toward corners of the room, tossing others toward a big soft chair that soon was studded with the little moons. Carefully, then, she picked up the treasures and placed them in a big mixing bowl with the rubies and emerald. And she thought she was done with these hijinks when she trod upon a neglected pearl. Her feet were whisked from beneath her, and she fell down flat, on the way down knocking over a chair tha
t shattered the glass front of a cabinet full of crockery, demolished a row of glasses, and turned violently on its side a lighted oil lamp.
Maybe I should study ballet, she mused as she lay on her floor after this spectacular demolition of most of her kitchen. And as she got painfully to her feet and stood dimly over the ruins, feeling the bruises bud and flower around her body; as she watched, the flame of the oil lamp, still burning, moved slowly under the power that had threaded together the day’s events. It wound from bit to bit of useless glass, from tooth to shard, from sliver to starburst pane, and with the silence we find at flametip transformed every piece of broken glass into a diamond.
This is really getting excessive, she thought; but she knew what to do.
First, with the emerald—she meditated on its vintage clarity; its green like some candent, constant mint spirit; its perfect edge leading her eyes into the midmost of the jewel. And she looked into that place, saw the tranquility there, and after some time of looking she saw the forest, banked and coded within the jewel. All the myriad beauties of the whole forest were present there in her hand, ready to her touch.
She remembered that the local forest had been over the years disappearing under the axe, under the crust of the growing town; and so, day by day, ordinary, ancient, woodland knowledge was being forced from the practical affairs of humankind. To what purpose, then, might a forest be hidden in an emerald?
Our lady decided that she had in her hands a ruse intended to trick humans into recognizing forests as jewels in their own right. The trick would work because emeralds are highly valued due to their rarity, yet forests are infinitely more rare than emeralds; therefore, having been brought to consider the two in association, even humans, logical creatures that they are, should eventually be able to understand that however expensive emeralds may be, a forest is precious beyond reason—precious like justice, peace, stars, and the pleasures of women.
The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace Page 12
