Often, we would gather at a pub on Franklin Street to read to each other our best work—not like in class. There we would read our throwaway poems because the teacher, no matter what a poem’s worth, would listen to a student’s poem with his eyes closed, his fingers folded together and his index fingers buried into the bridge of his nose. He graced his face with a look of rapture. It became a game among the students to read in class their most devilishly awful and hackneyed doggerel and listen with an undisclosed smirk as he praised it to the moon. The real game was to suppress your giggles as he extolled the virtues of every poem. But in the pub we were a master’s class at the height of our craft. Our best work was put forth and received honest and often brutal critiques.
One of the students from the religion department was a strange and ethereal girl. Her skin was translucent, almost an Alice blue. She had a sharp, delicate face with round (more than generous) ears that could not be kept contained within her thin straight hair. I’m not sure I ever knew her real name. We called her MT (em tee), from the initials, Mus timidus, a nickname that she seemed to enjoy as a mark of acceptance. She was pathologically shy. She rarely shared her poetry and she never offered critique or advice to anyone. When she did share an offering, it was always stunningly complex. She used technically challenging forms with such beauty and grace and insight that offering advice seemed silly (although we tried and which she took with appreciation). She read, and even spoke, multiple medieval languages. She was unique, weird, wonderful, and quiet.
She was always there. She seemed to follow us around like a puppy. When we would slide from pub to pub to put down a few beers, she would order one but take only a sip or two from each, leaving a string of unfinished drinks. When we ordered a pizza or fish and chips she would nibble on a little but not touch much. If you wrote down everything she said over the course of the summer it would have amounted to only a page or two of text. We all liked her and encouraged her to interact, but she would just hide her smile behind her hand and mumble something we rarely caught. Her teeth were strangely misaligned and we speculated how this might have affected her self-confidence.
At the end of the summer we were devastated to find out after she missed several of our outings that she was in the hospital. She was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer on the right side of her heart. Given its location, the doctors said there was nothing they could do and she would likely not last more than a few weeks. The truth was from the time she was admitted until the time she died was only ten days. When we finally heard about her being in the hospital we came immediately, but it was on the seventh day since her admittance. She was optimistic and seemed not to be as sick as the doctors were saying. She was clear-headed and animated.
We visited together as a group and joked with her for about an hour after which her mother, who had come from Vermont, said maybe we should let her get some rest. As we were leaving, MT called me back and asked if we could talk alone for a minute. I said yes, of course. When the door closed after the group had been herded out by her mother, she reached into a bag and brought out a small present wrapped in brittle white tissue paper swathed liberally with a braided red twine. She handed it to me with liturgical solemnity, deliberately, carefully as if it were rare and precious.
“I made this for you.”
I moved to open it, but she stopped me and said, “Later. OK? Your birthday is in a month. Right? Save it for that.”
I knew what she was saying: Wait until I die.
I started to cry. I wasn’t close to this girl. I knew little enough about her, but I was quite overcome and touched by her gesture. This was our first conversation alone in all the time I’d known her. She reached out and took my hand and patted it softly, then kissed it. She leaned back on her bed and closed her eyes, resting. I kissed her on the forehead and thanked her again for the gift. She opened her eyes and smiled, “Thank you,” she whispered.
I moved toward the door and she suddenly struggled into a sitting position and said, “Please come back soon.” I said I would and stepped out of the door. Her mother smiled at me and thanked me for coming and went back into the room. I never saw her again. This was on Thursday. We’d planned to come back on Saturday. She died in the early morning hours on that day.
Her body was sent back to Vermont so we could not even attend her funeral. During the two weeks that remained of the summer, at every gathering the group would order one extra beer, which we would leave untouched—as she would have. A memorial to MT. Our friend.
I’ve come out to the promontory to read under the moonlight. In my hand is one of my few treasures. The book MT made. When she said she made it for me, she meant ‘made’ literally. It was fashioned from soft dyed red leather inlaid with a delicate etched Celtic frame, tooled to enclose a hand-painted medieval illuminated panel showing a unicorn bleeding and a weeping maiden holding the beast’s head to her bosom. The pages were made of home-brewed birch bark paper and polished to a high sheen, sewn together and glued carefully into the binding. A rice paper page cover protects an original artwork of flowers and vines creating the title page: The Book of Gilda Trillim. In it are original translations from Old French, Latin, and several English and German variants of medieval women mystics. In lovely calligraphy, they are written in inks of red, gold, blue, and black. The preface on the first page is taken from the opening frontispiece of the Beguine heretic Marguerite Porete’s book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, for which she was burned at the stake:
You who would read this book,
If you truly wish to seize it,
Think about what you say,
For it is very tricky to comprehend;
Humility, the keeper of the assets of
Knowledge
And the mother of the other Virtues,
Must overtake you.3
Every entry in the book is about the mystery of love. Sometimes it is personified as a being, and others as the mysterious force of God. In every entry there is something about how the women immersed themselves as in a flaming fire that consumed them. The entries are ecstatic and overflowing with passion or longing or exhortation to love. The last piece in the book is a heartbreaking stanza from the Beguine poet Hadewijch’s the Subjugation to Love:
And I am now forsaken,
By all creatures alive:
This is clearly evident.
If in love
I cannot triumph,
What will become of me?
I am small now; then I would be nothing.
I am disconsolate unless Love furnishes a cure.
I see no deliverance; she must give me
Enough to live on freely.4
The last page is inscribed, “With love your mus timidus.”
It seems strange to me that all this love was masked from me. Love that would create such work of art as this. Yet to me at the time, she was just an odd little friend who joined us on a summer’s adventure. Were it not for her memorable death and this book, I likely would have altogether forgotten her. She would become a creature of memory, one of those bygone souls who withdraws into the fogs of the past, just part of an atmosphere that provides mood to recollection but cannot be brought up explicitly except as a shadow. Someone who when called to mind by a friend or acquaintance by, “Do you remember that odd mousy girl who was in our poetry class?” you might answer, “Kind of. Was she the one with the enormous ears?” “Yes, that’s the one. I wonder what ever happened to her?” But all her depth of feeling, her passions, her immeasurable worth and value are masked and lost in the shrouds and mists of a moment passing. Oh, how I wish I could go back and meet her. To know the person this book reveals.
Let me assess. I’ve tried to discover the depth of things, to find the place in which ‘isness’ hides in apple seeds. I’ve explored the connections that make a thing coalesce into a thing. An object. I’ve wandered through much and after all, end knowing nothing. I don’t know what I am. I don’t understand what anything is. On my vision quest, I wa
s told that love was the one thing that mattered. Why? Isn’t it, as the scientists are claiming, just a brain bathed in certain hormones? A certain tone added to the music of life? Are we not apish machines that click and clack in a mockery of a stopgap motion movie monster over Tokyo? Am I just the spinning of soggy gears and meaty levers? I cannot even come to know myself? When I am asleep my body does things I neither control nor react to, so what do I know?
And yet here I am watching waves cascade one after another in steady regularity tamed by the moon. But the moon does more than draw the white breakers from the ocean: it floods them with light reflected from the sun. It combines with coral reefs, which break and complexify the water into a foamy, roiling turbulence that adds texture to the combination, which, when added to me and my neural tangles, creates in this universe a sense of beauty. A moment of awe. That is something. Not an object. Not a structure although it is conditioned by that matrix. But this beauty? It is more than these elements. It is something that sneaks up from deep evolutionary time, combines with an occasion called now, trysts with matter, dances with consciousness, and into what? Something above all this. An abundance. An overflowing that stretches upward and outward. A grace?
Then Love? I look at the book in my lap. Its beauty exceeds the moonlit play of elements below me. It was born of love. Love known by Christian mystics, drawn to something beyond. And that love flows forward in wave-like ripples that ride the ocean of humanity until it crashes into a young poet and artist who then evaporates into nothingness? But not before she creates a current that pulls me like a riptide into the depths of love and memory. Did those mystics learn it from the Galilean? And his love’s origins? Was he the source or does it begin before him? When did love enter the world? What slime-emergent creature first felt its tremblings or even the nascent motions or the first intimations of this thing we call love?
So here I sit. A moment. A moment bathed in light and created by moon, ocean waves, and lava from deep in the depths of the earth. And from a book born of an unrealized love who brought to life fellow travelers from the middle ages, who in turn worshiped a carpenter, who defied an empire by bowing to it, and all blending with a woman who was given a glimpse of creation, or of her mind’s conception thereof (is there a difference?), a woman who loved rats and from that love midwifed an emerging music new in the world from sources similar to what her own race must have once passed through. What am I? This moment? This strange blend of past and present, of history and emergent consciousness. Beauty? Love? In me? Overflowing me? Creating me? Defining me?
I pause.
This is where the fragment of a journal entry ends. With ‘I pause.’ We don’t know how this would have ended. The book from MT has never been found. Years later she laments a lost treasure in a letter to Babs Lake and most scholars believe that that treasure may have been this book.
Vignette 14 Trillim in New York Notes. Circa Late 1972
The following document and Vignette 15 are the only written records we have of Trillim’s stay in New York. She knew composer Monty Smith from high school in Burley, Idaho. Smith was a well-known figure in the Greenwich Village music scene and maintained an extravagant life style under the patronage of the DEA, an organization devoted to the arts and in particular Smith. He was raised Mormon, but had abandoned the Church shortly after leaving Idaho to study music in Los Angeles.
Trillim’s trip to New York is shrouded in mystery and much is unknown. But while her Journal mentions almost in passing that she “is going to the Big Apple,” she never directly refers to it again. These documents were uncovered by Trillim scholar Sergey Petrov, whose writings on Trillim and Smith’s relationship are intriguing and well worth perusing if just for a wealth of arcane information about high school life in Burley in the 1950s.1
Document 1: Mary Lassiter Mental Health Hospital. Manhattan, NY. Floor Logbook.
Floor Logbook
For attending staff floor notes only, please refer to patient’s chart for full information.
Patient name: Jane Doe #394
Admitting Physician: Dr. Aaron Mossberg, Ph: 212-116-2874
Date: Oct. 13, 1972
Time: 11:40 pm
Baseline: Pulse: 128; Blood Pressure: Sys: 154, D: 94; Wt: 123; Pupils: slightly dilated, responding to light.
Physical Appearance: Patient arrived filthy, with multiple superficial abrasions incl. both knees, elbows, nose, chin, and forehead. Patient is missing R. hand at wrist from previous injury. Face bloody from nasal contusion and one canine knocked out through trauma. Rat bites on hand and arms. Patient not oriented to time or place. Speech confused. Periods of calm punctuated with violent episodes of uncontrolled thrashing noted. No identification.
Reason for Admittance: Psychotic episode. Asks repeatedly for Fatty Lumpkin and Paps. Was found screaming in sewer near the corner of West 4th St. and Perry St. At least some injuries incurred in resisting Fire Department’s attempts to extract her from the sewer system.
Treatment: Placed in a straight jacket and retrained in cushioned restraint room 23B. Given 25 mg/mL injection of Thorazine and 600mg Aspirin. Wounds have been cleaned and bandaged, largely superficial except for the tooth. (Arrangements for an oral surgeon have been scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.) She is currently sleeping.
Update: 5:20 am. Awoke asked for water. Did not understand where she was or how she got here. Seems calm.
Vignette 15: Article from The Greenwich Peeper by Pseudonymous Author, ‘Madam Alley Cat.’ October 15, 1972.
Mew, mew, mew Village cool cats! Your one true and lovely pussy has been slinking about on the prowl, putting naughty whiskers where none belong and leaving long luscious stripes skating down the backs of those who won’t give her a nibble for her sweet-sweet purr-purr. Stay on Madam Alley Cat’s groovy side (you can call her MAC, she loves familiarity and even enjoys the occasional petting party) or find your mug under the tease and tickle of her unsheathed pen! (Still looking for that striped Tom among the big intact males around the trashycans that will win licks from her sticky tongue!)
So what’s up in and about the Village? Let us see!
Who is that kibble dish hanging around monsieur violinist Martin du Gard at the NY Phil? Hot, hot redhead, (and MEOW, with that red dress and ruby red slippers she can click click click me to Kansas anytime, the Madam isn’t picky. Purr!). But no one knows her name—Until now! For MAC has found fresh sardines in the oily can! What will the Ambassador think when he finds Mrs. Ambassador has developed a new enthusiasm for the symphony? Ah the music is so sweet! Kyllä! (That’s Finnish for Ja!)
Now lookee lookee MAC was nosing through the leavings behind ‘Serendipity 3,’ and whose voice came rogue elephanting through the door? Was that the editor of Style 180 breaking decibel levels loud enough to discomfit the ears of this streetwise feline whose soft tufted ears have heard the cry of many a frustrated Tom? Yowl! If one day you find yourself that brassy blue-penciler’s assistant never, ever forget that grand lady’s appointment book. And I hear there is now an opening in the dame’s vicinity for a new lackey peon! So you of stout ears, get your résumé polished! Also, anyone need a slightly deaf assistant? I hear there is one available who promises never ever to forget a daybook again!
So now for the undercover, top secret, report of the month. Madam loves to stretch the length of her line to draw out the wild and wacky world of the Village to a depth only a kitty cat can plumb. And we have a woozy doozy this time! What happens when a minimalist novelist and a minimalist composer smash their heads together to wow us with the claim that they have fashioned the best and most wonderful thing ever? Meow! The screeches of ‘ittle boyds’ mimicking rats? Sound bad? Yup, yup, yup. I’ve eaten better four-day-old fish livers.
So what is it about the water of yon Burly, Idaho that pushes out stud muffins (or is it spud muffins) and minimalists? Turns out the literary writer of wonky lists, Gilda Trillim is friends with the Village’s own spare composer Monty Smith! Both from that art
haven Idaho, the state providing a never-ending supply of the French fry equivalents of art. You know greasy and bland but oh so hard to resist. You’ll remember him, kittens, as we have crossed paths in the night a time or two. He prowls in a house stacked to the brim with a who’s who of the local crowd (including that wack, wack, wacky Japanese Beatle heart thief). He’s regaled us with those three-hour pianoforte ‘concerts’ (and let those cute little quotidian marks guide your ideas about what I think of these little ‘gatherings’). Indian gurus wielding a tambura are being dispensed for a shiny dime out of a machine in the corner and the incense never stops smoking in those digs when the gang gets their well-tuned claviers claviering! But one-handed Gilda, meow, yowl, what a weird sour bowl of milk is she. She disappears on a USO tour in Nam and turns up where? Back in the USSR, boys, you don’t know how lucky you are boy, back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR. How she got from the Nam-ish Southeast Asian pisshole to Moscow is anyone’s guess, but you can bet that old J. Edger has his peeping Tom eyes on her (he would like to get his paws on this prowler, but he’s a fat old paddy cake that can’t find his way to this quick running pussy).
Gilda Trillim Page 19
