by B W Powe
Grace seemed happy when she talked to the air. She returned to her work around the house with a smile. Her parents began to wonder if she was an idiot. Problems like this didn’t run in their family, but her behaviour could have been the start of a fault-line. Their concern turned to fear. What if she was crazy?
One day her worried parents took Grace to their parish priest. The town had a fine old church. It had many statues of saints. The dominant one among many was one of Mary. She looked on people with her compassionate glance. At her feet people left flowers and gifts in baskets.
When Grace saw the statue, she said: “Ah.” And she smiled. It was a form of recognition. And the girl whispered a prayer. Her mother and father told the priest about their daughter’s behaviour. He was an old man, thought by many in the town to be wise, but whose primary qualities were patience and kindliness. He was gentle with the girl. He sat her down in the rectory office and asked her questions.
“Who do you speak to when you’re sitting on your porch?” he asked.
“Mary.”
“Does she look like our statue?”
“Yes. Only more so. She’s all in white. And she shines.” “Does she have a scent?”
“A what?”
“A smell.”
“Yes. Of flowers. I don’t know what kind. She smells very sweet.”
“What does she say?”
“She tells me of the world and its pain. She tells me about people. And she talks about God and about the saints. Sometimes she mentions angels. She says: ‘All is well... all will be well... all things will be well... all is well...’” “Does she tell you to go against your family?”
“Never.”
“Does she ever tell you to preach against the church?”
“Never.”
“Does she tell you to break the law?”
“Never.”
“Does she tell you to do anything you desire?”
“Never.”
“Does she tell you to make the weak and the poor of heart serve the strong?”
“Never.”
“Does she tell you to be afraid?”
“She tells me to be brave.”
The old priest nodded. He patted her head affectionately and told her to return to her home. Spontaneously he asked for a blessing. She blessed him and asked him for his blessing, too. This he did. Afterwards he felt very happy. The priest talked to her parents. He said: “All is well. She talks to Mary. There’s nothing to worry about.”
And he smiled.
“Please bring her to church more often,” he said.
Now her parents were even more alarmed.
Their daughter must be delusional – deeply sick. And the old priest couldn’t help them. (At least he could have performed an exorcism, or something suitably dramatic, to return Grace to a semblance of normalcy.) Maybe the priest was too old. Had he gone soft in the brain? They had to find medical help.
So they went to the psychiatrist who had begun to practice at the hospital. He was a representative of a new and growing field: the science of the mind. A young man, brilliant and dedicated, he expressed his concern for the girl. He offered to meet her and to observe her.
The doctor met Grace at his office in the hospital in town over many weeks. They talked for an hour at a time. The doctor soon came to the house to study her closely. He saw her talking to the air, and took notes. He watched her help around the house, and he reflected. He consulted with his fellow psychiatrists. They listened, and took notes, too. They conferred with each other, and muttered about the strangeness of this case. The doctors began to trade opinions.
The psychiatrist spent months studying her. He liked the girl’s innocence. But he became more and more concerned about her singular behaviour. She rarely varied her routine. And yet she seemed happy.
Finally, the doctor came to her parents to talk of his findings and recommendations. He said:
“After observation and investigation, I’ve come to the conclusion that Grace is schizophrenic. I’m sorry to say she’s suffering from delusions. Her behaviour, alas, is not treatable by therapy or medication. She’s convinced that her delusions are real. It’s my belief that she will always be so entranced.”
“This is terrible,” her father said.
Her mother wept.
“Yes,” the young doctor said, solemnly and coolly. “It is.” “What do you recommend?” her mother asked.
“That she be committed to our asylum outside of town. She can do no harm there, either to herself or to others. We can continue to observe her behaviour. By studying her we may one day be able to help her.”
Her parents were sad, but they believed in medical science, and they wanted to help Grace. They loved her very much. They agreed with the doctor that this commitment to the asylum was for the best. They signed the papers and took her to the hospital for the insane. Sorrowful, they returned to their home. It was terribly quiet without her.
Grace went happily to the asylum.
Once she was there she began to help the other patients. She helped them by cleaning rooms and making meals, smiling and telling them: “All is well.” She found a bench outside the rooms, on the hospital grounds. In the good weather she’d sit and talk to the air.
In this way she grew to be a woman. She became a valued member of the hospital. The doctors and nurses commented on how she had the ability to lift people’s moods. But the nurses and doctors also commented, with sadness in their voices, how she continued in her delusions. She was happy to confirm to anyone who asked that she was talking to Mary. Her schizophrenia, the doctors said, was permanent. Her parents slowly and stoically accepted this information. They visited her often. They did so even when they were becoming tired. Every time they came she said: “All shall be well.” They were grateful that there was some variation in her sayings. But soon they couldn’t think of much to say, and their health began to fail.
The old priest died years after he’d talked to her. It’s said that when the kindly old man passed on there was a scent of flowers in his room. His last words were: “All is well.” The psychiatrist became a well-respected physician who expanded on the theories of schizophrenia. He wrote learned papers and helped many people. He visited Grace
at the hospital, always finding their conversations, while simple, to be somehow enlivening. Over time the doctor came to value his time with her. He looked forward to the hour or two they spent together. While Grace remained delusional, he saw the beneficial effect she had on others. And so he didn’t try to correct her symptoms. She was incurable, at any rate.
Grace grew old in the asylum. She never went outside the hospital grounds. When she died, her last words were: “All is well.” The doctors and patients and nurses and groundskeepers called her “Miss All is Well.” Some said this with affection, even respect. Others said it with derision. Still others just said it indifferently. Some said it with curiosity, wondering what it meant. The doctors thought of naming her favourite bench on the grounds after her. Other pressing matters took hold. Soon the idea was forgotten.
Grace passed into memory. The psychiatrist’s files on her were placed in archives. He grew old, and found himself talking to her, at times, in his mind, when he needed cheering up.
The home where she had lived with her parents fell into disrepair after they died. It was soon razed to the ground to make way for new dwellings.
The moral of the story may be: be careful what you tell people.
The moral of the story may be: be careful who you talk to. The moral of the story may be: she passed on joy, in whatever form.
The moral of the story may be: all is well.
Delphic Ironies I
1.
Heroes know where they’re going. They carry certainty in the way they carry a sword or a gun. Heroes presume the blessing of God, the Gods, the G
oddesses, or the Spirit. They’ll found a city over the bones of their beloveds.
2.
Pilgrims and knights never know exactly where they’re going. They wear doubt as a shield against arriving too soon. Knights and pilgrims must learn to read the signs, pick up clues. They never found a city or a state, but they’ll serve in one, if it’s just. If it ceases to be just, they move on.
3.
Heroes turn unjust if those around them no longer share in their certainty. Pilgrims and knights travel uncertain paths, heeding the call, in the way that they hear it. Heroes hack out paths, and sometimes become immune to any new call. They can become tragic.
4.
Pilgrims and knights invariably end up being comic, or poignant, or both. (Think of Chaucer’s Canterbury travellers, Don Quixote, Falstaff, the White Knight in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.) King Arthur returns to knighthood when he doubts Guinevere. Lancelot is never truly at home anywhere.
Wilde Things I
1.
The problem with eternity is there’s no end to it.
2.
Minimalism is just too much.
3.
Sincerity is the new irony.
4.
Flaubert once said (somewhere) a writer should live like a bourgeois in order to write like a demon. Nowadays many writers live like demons in order to write like the bourgeois.
5.
Travellers in the global theatre: they don’t have accents. They just put them on whenever they think it’s necessary.
6.
She must have had narcolepsy. I know this because every time I asked her a question, she fell asleep.
7.
Deep down, he was profoundly shallow.
8.
The scent of an age: aroma wasn’t built in a day.
9.
The most serious story: imagine Don Quixote without Sancho Panza – visions unlimited. Imagine Sancho Panza without Don Quixote – parody unlimited.
10.
“Everything I got for Christmas needs a battery.” – a 21st- century child’s remark
11.
GPS: these days it’s a luxury to get lost.
12.
Animism: soul in the chicken soup.
13.
Sterne should have been named Swift, and Swift – Sterne. Wilde should have had Whitman’s name; and Whitman should have been called Wilde.
14.
“It’s not safe to ask this man a simple question.” – Groucho Marx
15.
In an ecumenical family a grievance is dealt with in these ways:
the Christian forgives...
the Buddhist thanks you for the learning process...
the Muslim grants that all is God’s will...
the Jew never forgets...
the agnostic says, it’s okay, even if it isn’t... the nihilist says, screw you...
the pluralist says, all of the above is true...
Delphic Ironies II
1.
After a crisis you can tell the extent of the psychic damage in people by how quickly they respond with a joke. If people immediately tell a joke about the crisis, then you know they’re processing the trauma. If the jokes surface slowly – or not at all – then you know that the wound is deep.
2.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
1,711.
An ion beam etching machine can engrave a two dimensional angel on a pinpoint. The tiny area can accommodate 1,711 angels. The process is called microfabulation. The ion beams can etch out forms on a microchip that are so detailed and minute that even that notorious theological conundrum can be answered.
This process demythologizes and re-mythologizes – or disenchants and re-enchants – simultaneously. It shows that through technology an old question can have a practical response: and it shows that technology creates new conditions. How much more could be put on that point?
The God Delusion
1.
To Richard Dawkins: you say in The God Delusion that there is and can be no God. There is no empirical evidence. You call such belief in a higher being a delusion, something much worse than an illusion. You rail against church institutions and against religion, decrying the ignorance of their bigots and zealots. You point to fanaticism and to the wasteful expenditures of energy on faith. I take a breath, and step back from reading your book, and then surprise myself with my reply, with how much I agree with many of the things you say.
2.
What are we to do with the restrictions of dogma, the weight of institutions, the contradictions and holes in religious texts, the excluding sometimes excruciatingly smug emotional blackmail of the faithful, the willed ignorance of the zealots, the territoriality of the convinced, the credulity of those who wear their God like a wall.
3.
Then I have to say, there’s an area where I must swerve away from you.
When the oceanic rolls over me...
When I touch a rose flowering in spring...
When the wind rustles the Maples and Birches...
When the sky is awash in rippling clouds...
When my children dash screeching happy through our house, and then down the street...
When I look to the horizon...
When I touch the coffin bearing my best friend into the earth...
When I read Walt Whitman or William Blake...
When I listen to Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, to Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, to Beethoven’s last string quartet, to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Bright Morning Star”...
When I find myself praying to whatever may be there... When I read the last page of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day...
When I read Milton’s evocation of “unawakened Eve with tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek... [And Adam] with looks of cordial love/Hung over her enamoured, and beheld/Beauty...” and then I remember love...
When I watch spring buds spurting again into green leaves... When my heart moves to the stars moving...
When I’m touched by something I can’t see...
When I find delicate white dust on a butterfly’s orange- black wing...
When the butterfly’s wing grows, becoming something that seems like the edge of an angel...
When the signs of the day say travel – go – feel – sense what is around you...
When I sense a bare-bones outline to the cosmic X-ray... When I love...
4.
And then, Richard Dawkins, I’m not with you. I’m elsewhere, though still here, in the present, where something I can’t explain leaves me changed, never again to be sure that there’s nothing but mass and energy.
5.
The feeling of the oceanic is missing in you. (Freud was engagingly honest in his essays, Civilization and its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion: he admitted that he’d never felt such an emotion, this presence.)
6.
Often I don’t know what to make of the rumblings, the vibrations, the hints, the whisperings, the signs, the breaks or spots in time, what comes up and between the letters on a page and the rose petals left scattered on my counter. All this, and yet the wind moves, is moving. There.
7.
I suppose we could do without words like God or religion. Maybe we’d be better off without such grand terms. But I can imagine replacing those words with these: sacred, source – correspondence and beauty, the origin, the now, and inspiration – and I can imagine asking that they reverberate in solitude, and in the subtle yarn and unexpected yet welcoming communions and gatherings, when standing on a bridge over a river, when sitting beside its current.
8.
And so we go (you and I, my stranger friend), staggering a little, but confident at times, searching within and without (in the imagination and its realms; in all the realities you fi
nd outside), sometimes reflecting in the quiet of your heart the wealth of impressions, the opening that comes in the bright morning, taking the rose you dreamed of last night and somehow finding a way to place it beside the current, that is poetry and life together, encountering more, and more, traces of what we’ll hope will be illuminations of the larger soul.
The Sad Angel
The angel visited the boy in his small playroom. She came in the morning and stayed with him until he had visitors. The main visitor was his nanny, his caregiver. His parents were too busy to spend a full day with him. They reserved a special hour or two with him at night before he went to bed, before they uncorked a new bottle of Merlot.
When the angel entered his room, William said: “Hello.” “Hello,” she said. And she folded her huge white wings and knelt beside him.
