Moonlight and Vines

by Charles de Lint

  I don’t know when exactly it was that I got so interested in the supernatural, you know, fairy tales and all. I mean, I was always interested in them, the way kids are, but I didn’t let them go. I collected unusual and odd facts, read the Brothers Grimm, Lady Gregory, Katharine Briggs, but Famous Monsters and ghost stories, too. They gave me something the animals couldn’t—or didn’t—but I needed it all the same.

  Animal stories connected me to the landscape we inhabited—to their world, to my world, to all the wonder that can exist around us. They grounded me, but were no relief from unhappiness and strife. But fairy tales let me escape. Not away from something, but to something. To hope. To a world beyond this world where other ways of seeing were possible. Where other ways of treating each other were possible.

  An Irish writer, Lord Dunsany, coined the phrase “Beyond the Fields We Know” to describe fairyland, and that’s always appealed to me. First there’s the comfort of the fields we do know, the idea that it’s familiar and friendly. Home. Then there’s the otherness of what lies beyond them that so aptly describes what I imagine the alien topography of fairyland to be. The grass is always greener in the next field over, the old saying goes. More appealing, more vibrant. But perhaps it’s more dangerous as well. No reason not to explore it, but it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that one should perhaps take care.

  If I’d thought that I had any aptitude as an artist, I don’t think I’d ever have become a writer. All I ever wanted to capture was moments. The trouble is, most people want narrative, so I tuck those moments away in the pages of a story. If I could draw or paint the way I see those moments in my head, I wouldn’t have to write about them.

  It’s scarcely an original thought, but a good painting really can hold all the narrative and emotional impact of a novel—the viewer simply has to work a little harder than a reader does with a book. There are fewer clues. Less taking the viewer by the hand and leading him or her through all the possible events that had to occur to create this visualized moment before them.

  I remember something Jilly once said about how everyone should learn to draw competently at an early age, because drawing, she maintains, is one of the first intuitive gestures we make to satisfy our appetites for beauty and communication. If we could acknowledge those hungers, and do so from an early age, our culture would be very different from the way it is today. We would understand how images are used to compel us, in the same way that most of us understand the subtleties of language.

  Because, think of it. As children, we come into the world with a natural desire to both speak and draw. Society makes sure that we learn language properly, right from the beginning, but art is treated as a gift of innate genius, something we either have or don’t. Most children are given far too much praise for their early drawings, so much so that they rarely learn the ability to refine their first crude efforts the way their early attempts at language are corrected.

  How hard would it be to ask children what they see in their heads? How big should the house be in comparison to the family standing in front of it? What is it about the anatomy of the people that doesn’t look right? Then let them try it again. Teach them to learn how to see and ask questions. You don’t have to be Michelangelo to teach basic art, just as you don’t have to be Shakespeare to be able to teach the correct use of language.

  Not to be dogmatic about it, because you wouldn’t want any creative process to lose its sense of fun and adventure. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take it seriously as well.

  Because children know when they’re being patronized. I remember, so clearly I can remember, having the picture in my head and it didn’t look at all like what I managed to scribble down on paper. When I was given no direction, in the same way that my grammar and sentence structure and the like were corrected, I lost interest and gave up. Now it seems too late.

  I had a desk I made as a teenager—a wide board laid across a couple of wooden fruit crates. I’d set out my pens and ink, my paper, sit cross-legged on a pillow in front of it and write for hours. I carried that board around with me for years, from rooming house to apartments. I still have it, only now it serves as a shelf that holds plants underneath a window in the dining room. Saskia finds it odd, that I remain so attached to it, but I can’t let it go. It’s too big a piece of my past—one of the tools that helped free me from a reality that had no room for the magic I needed the world to hold, but could only make real with words.

  I didn’t just like to look at animals. I’d pretend to be them, too. I’d scrabble around all day on my hands and knees through the bush to get an understanding of that alternative viewpoint. Or I’d run for miles, the horse in me effortlessly carrying me through fields, over fences, across streams. Remember when you’d never walk, when you could run? It never made any sense to go so slow.

  And even at home, or at school, or when we’d go into town, the animals would stay with me. I’d carry them secreted in my chest. That horse, a mole, an owl, a wolf. Nobody knew they were there, but I did. Their secret presence both comforted and thrilled me.

  I write differently depending on the pen I use. Ballpoints are only good for business scribbles, or for making shopping lists, and even then, I’ll often use a fountain pen. When I first wrote, I did so with a dip pen and ink. Colored inks, sometimes—sepia, gold, and a forest green were the most popular choices—but usually India ink. I used a mapping nib, writing on cream-colored paper with deckled edges and more tooth than might be recommended for that sort of nib. The dip pen made me take my time, think about every word before I committed to it.

  But fountain pens grew to be my writing implement of choice. A fat, thick-nibbed, deep green Cross from which the ink flowed as though sliding across ice, or a black Waterman with a fine point that made tiny, bird-track-like marks across the page.

  When I began marketing my work, I typed it up—now I use a computer—but the life of my first drafts depends on the smooth flow of a fountain pen. I can, and did, and do, write anywhere with them. All I need is the pen and my notebook. I’ve written standing up, leaning my notebook on the cast-iron balustrade of the Kelly Street Bridge, watching the dark water flow beneath me, my page lit by the light cast from a streetlamp. I’ve written in moonlight and in cafés. In the corner of a pub and sitting at a bus stop.

  I can use other implements, but those pens are best. Pencil smears, pen and ink gets too complicated to carry about, Rapidographs and rollerballs don’t have enough character, and ballpoints have no soul. My fountain pens have plenty of both. Their nibs are worn down to the style of my hand, the shafts fit into my fingers with the comfort of the voice of a long-time friend, met unexpectedly on a street corner but no less happily for the surprise of the meeting.

  Time passes oddly. Though I know the actual contrast is vast, I don’t feel much different now from when I was fifteen. I still feel as clumsy and awkward and insecure about interacting with others, about how the world sees me, though intellectually, I understand that others don’t perceive me in the same way at all. I’m middle-aged, not a boy. I’m at that age when the boy I was thought that life would pretty much be over, yet now I insist it’s only begun. I have to. To think otherwise is to give up, to actually be old.

  That’s disconcerting enough. But when a year seems to pass in what was only a season for the boy, a dreamy summer that would never end, the long cold days of winter when simply stepping outside made you feel completely alive, you begin to fear the ever-increasing momentum of time’s passage. Does it simply accelerate forever, or is there a point when it begins to slow down once again? Is that the real meaning of “over the hill”? You start up slow, then speed up to make the incline. Reach the top and gravity has you speeding once more. But eventually your momentum decreases, as even a rolling stone eventually runs out of steam.

  I don’t know. What I do know is that the antidote for me is to immerse myself in something like my writing, though simply puttering around the apartment can be as effective. There’s
something about familiar tasks that keeps at bay the unsettling sense of everything being out of my control. Engaging in the mundane, whether it be watching the light change in the sky at dusk, playing with my neighbor’s cat, or enjoying the smell of freshly brewed coffee, serves to alter time. It doesn’t so much stop the express, as allow you to forget it for a while. To recoup, catch your breath.

  But writing is best, especially the kind that pulls you out of yourself, off the page, and takes you into a moment of clarity, an instant of happy wonder, so perfect that words, stumbling through the human mind, are inadequate to express.

  The writer’s impossible task is to illuminate such moments, yes, but also the routines, the things we do or feel or simply appreciate, that happen so regularly that they fade away into the background the way street noise and traffic become inaudible when you’ve lived in the city long enough. It’s the writer’s job to illuminate such moments as well, to bring them back into awareness, to acknowledge the gift of their existence and share that acknowledgment with others.

  By doing this, we are showing deference to the small joys of our lives, giving them meaning. Not simply for ourselves, but for others as well, to remind them of the significance to be found in their lives. And what we all discover, is that nothing is really ordinary or familiar after all. Our small worlds are more surprising and interesting than we perceive them to be.

  But we still need enchantment in our lives. We still need mystery. Something to connect us to what lies beyond the obvious, to what, perhaps, is the obvious, only seen from another, or better-informed, perspective.

  Mystery.

  I love that word. I love how, phonetically, it seems to hold both “myth” and “history.” The Kickaha use it to refer to God, the Great Mystery. But they also ascribe to animism, paying respect to small, mischievous spirits that didn’t create the world, but rather, are of the world. They call them mysteries, too. Manitou. The little mysteries.

  We call them faerie.

  We don’t believe in them.

  Our loss.

  Saskia is still sleeping. I look in on her, then slowly close the bedroom door. I put on my boots and jacket and go downstairs, out onto the pre-dawn streets. It’s my favorite time of day. It’s so quiet, but everything seems filled with potential. The whole world appears to hold its breath, waiting for the first streak of light to lift out of the waking eastern skies.

  After a few blocks, I hear footsteps and my shadow falls in beside me.

  “Still soul searching?” she asks.

  I nod, expecting a lecture on how worrying about “what if” only makes you miss out on “what is,” but she doesn’t say anything. We walk up Lee Street to Kelly, past the pub and up onto the bridge. Halfway across, I lean my forearms on the balustrade and look out across the water. She puts her back to the rail. I can feel her gaze on me. There’s no traffic. Give it another few hours and the bridge will be choked with commuters.

  “Why can’t I believe in magic?” I finally say.

  When there’s no immediate response, I look over to find her smiling.

  “What do you think I am?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. “A piece of me. Pieces of me. But you must be more than that now, because you’ve had experiences I haven’t shared since you . . . left.”

  “As have you.”

  “I suppose.” I turn my attention back to the water flowing under us. “Unless I’m delusional.”

  She laughs. “Yes, there’s always the risk of that, isn’t there?”

  “So which is it?”

  She shrugs.

  “At least tell me your name,” I say.

  Her only response is another one of those enigmatic smiles of hers that would have done Leonardo proud. I sigh, and try one more time.

  “Then tell me this,” I say. “Where do you go when you’re not with me?”

  She surprises me with an answer.

  “To the fields beyond the fields,” she says.

  “Can you take me with you some time?” I ask, keeping my voice casual. I feel like Wendy, waiting at the windowsill for Peter Pan.

  “But you already know the way.”

  I give her a blank look.

  “It’s all around you,” she says. “It’s here.” She touches her eyes, her ears. “And here.” She moves her hand to her temple. “And here.” She lays a hand upon her breast.

  I look away. The sun’s rising now and all the skyscrapers of midtown have a haloing glow, an aura of morning promise. A pair of crows lift from the roof of the pub and their blue-black wings have more color in them than I ever imagined would be possible. I watch them glide over the river, dip down, out of the sunlight, and become shadow shapes once more.

  I feel something shift inside me. A lifting of . . . I’m not sure what. An unaccountable easing of tension—not in my neck, or shoulders, but in my spirit. As though I’ve just received what Colin Wilson calls “absurd good news.”

  When I turn back, my companion is gone. But I understand. The place where mystery lives doesn’t necessarily have to make sense. It’s not that it’s nonsense, so much, as beyond sense.

  My shadow is the parts of me I’d hidden away—some because they didn’t fit who I thought I was supposed to be, some that I just didn’t understand.

  Her name is Mystery.

  St. John of the Cross wrote, “If a man wants to be sure of his road he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.”

  Into his shadow.

  Into mystery.

  I think I can do that.

  Or at least I can try.

  I pause there a moment longer, breathing deep the morning air, drawing the sun’s light down into my skin, then I turn, and head for home and Saskia. I think I have an answer for her now. She’ll still be sleeping, but even asleep, I know she’s waiting for me. Waiting for who I was to catch up with who I’ll be. Waiting for me to remember who I am and all I’ve seen.

  I think I’ll take the plants off that board in the dining room and reclaim the desk it was.

  I think I’ll buy a sketchbook when the stores open and take one of those courses that Jilly teaches at the Newford School of Art. Maybe it’s not too late.

  I think I’ll reacquaint myself with the animals that used to live in my chest.

  I think I’ll stop listening to that voice whispering “as if,” and hold onto what I experience, no matter how far it strays from what’s supposed to be.

  I’m going to live here, in the Fields We Know, fully, but I’m not going to let myself forget how to visit the fields beyond these fields. I’ll go there with words on the page, but without them, too. Because it’s long past time to stop letting pen and ink be the experience, instead of merely recording it.