Rumi and the Red Handbag

by Shawna Lemay

  The more I thought about the woman on the bicycle and Florine at Theodora’s in the back room or Florine the Fortune Teller—Madame Theodora, the further apart they seemed. I could no longer remember why I thought one was the other, though their names did rhyme. Maureen, Florine.

  ***

  On one of the earliest slips of paper, I had written: It’s not so much that she’s innocent, it’s that she’s very open, an exposed nerve. Maybe her entire nervous system is exposed. I think now that Ingrid-Simone was able to walk through the world in this way because she was also enthralled. Her sorrow, her wound, was so exposed that she seemed more real than ordinary people, more real than you or I. Her sorrow had transformed her so that she had the radiance of divinity. You might think this can’t happen in our century but it can. Usually when I picture her in my mind, she becomes something beautifully and intimately remote, serene and lightfilled, like a young woman in a Vermeer painting. But sometimes she resembles the rough painting of Rouault’s king. Thick black outlines, jeweltoned panels. The layers and layers of paint, the way that a glimmer of one colour is revealed below by the swipe of a brush over top, spreading another colour, concealing. In the Rouault paintings, I marvelled at the layers of sorrow, covered and covered, one bound to another as a salve. Built up until every sorrow is hit upon, every possible kind. And in Vermeer’s paintings, it is thinned. Painted so slowly. Light forms like honey in every recess, every opening, until everything is open and everything is secret. The paint encompasses everything around sorrow, the serenity, everything but sorrow, so that you can’t help but feel how stunning sorrow is as well.

  ***

  The thing I have refrained from mentioning is Ingrid-Simone’s purse. How she never carried one herself, and how I never noticed that until I was sitting on the bench.

  ***

  The bench. My green boat, my perch, my private waiting room.

  At first I was patient, expectant; I waited with a purpose. She would arrive. I thought frequently of the Grail King myth at the point where Percival enters the story. He has his moment, he might ask the question, he might be splendid, spontaneous. But the question is entangled in his ideas of propriety, of all those things he has been conditioned to believe. He is in the same room as suffering, but cannot ask. Time is fleeting, he doesn’t have long to speak the question. He must be spontaneous. His chance. It passes by.

  “The key to the Grail is compassion, suffering with, feeling another’s sorrow as if it were your own. The one who finds the dynamo of compassion is the one who’s found the Grail.” This is what Joseph Campbell says. The Grail isn’t an object; it’s a state of being. Percival failed in the Grail Castle. I failed in Theodora’s Fine Consignment Clothing.

  ***

  I sat on the green bench, gripping it; the bench gripped me. I might have been buried in a mound of soil, my bag beside me. I overdid the bag, visited the museum, read through the catalogue I bought. I ran an inventory through my head of all the bags that Ingrid-Simone had cleaned and repaired and loved and hated at Theodora’s. And then I thought of all the little bags inside my bag, the ones she made for me. Literary handbags.

  ***

  I rehearsed what I might say to her or ask her when she appeared, when she moved my bag over and sat beside me on the bench.

  At times, I wrote notes on the green bench. I transcribed what I jotted down on the scraps and bits of paper, on the ticket stub from the Jane Eyre movie I went to see at the Princess Theatre. At times, I felt lazy. I felt the futility of the procedure. What did I hope to accomplish by remembering someone in this way? Maybe it was akin to seeing faces on milk cartons. There was a slim chance that someone might recognize a child or themselves as a child. To be found. Or, if not that, the viewer might once again realize the tenuousness of things, to cleave to those they hold dear.

  I thought of her as my accomplice. At times, I felt so horribly alone. The purpose for the notes had changed. The notes were no longer for her; they were for me. Maybe they always were. Of course.

  ***

  I reached a point where I realized I didn’t need to remember or know everything about her. Didn’t need to write anything else down, to elaborate, to repeat things. I needed to sit and wait. Devotedly. Singlemindedly. I needed to keep her disappearance company, only that. Such an intimacy, this solitude, a juicy grandeur, an acquiescence to her essence.

  ***

  I took notes from the moment I met Ingrid-Simone. A compulsion that became a habit, recording her, her existence, on insubstantial slips of paper. I often wrote descriptions of her outfits. Sitting on the bench gave me an opportunity to sort the notes, so I could assemble all the ones on her outfits into one stack.

  —powder blue fortrel suit, flared pants, large lapels, hand sewn in the mid 1960s, large white floppy brimmed hat (straw), white anklelength vinyl boots

  —floorlength hippy dress, Empire waist, flounced sleeves, wooden bangles, wooden wedges, real daisies woven into a crown

  —business suit, men’s wear inspired, but with extremely feminine touches, pink high heels, pink Lucite necklace, cotton candy pink nail polish

  I took notes at first because I wanted to understand her. I knew she was someone beautiful, unconventionally beautiful. She herself was interested in what was considered to be so, aesthetically. What was pleasing, what could be brought into the realm of the fashionable. She had made it a quest to rehabilitate discarded things by recontextualizing them. She looked at a blouse on the metal hanger rack and we exclaimed at how perfectly hideous it was, how no one sane would buy such a thing. But in the next breath, she said, —hmmmmm, well, well. Let’s try looking at this another way then. What if we untucked this belt, cut the flouncy scarf off. Oh no, worry not, my Shaya, no one will notice. Then let’s pair it with these jeans and this black netted scarf. And honestly, you wouldn’t have guessed it was the same blouse at all.

  I wondered how souls intermingle, if her soul had in some way become part of mine. I thought about proximities, how they affected us. How we spent so many days together, eight hours a day, Tuesday to Saturday. Characters shouldn’t disappear in novels but in real life we disappear from each other all the time.

  I thought a lot about the contrast between the bathroom stalls at WalMart and the ones at the Museum. I wondered if Ingrid-Simone had been to the café at the museum and if she had ordered a little purseshaped bonbon to go with her coffee. I wondered if she went to the loo and if the beautifully lit silvery purses in the glassedin niches found in each stall made her happy. I thought they would. Or they may have made her cry and cry. I know I wept when I first saw them, but that after, they only made me smile.

  The end of the summer. I began to look wild in the eyes, unkempt, besieged by emptiness, by no one. Weary. Plainer than usual. Hair tied back, same clothes in rotation. I remembered reading Deleuze on Beckett, how he said that we should “distinguish between Beckett’s ‘lying down’ work and his ‘seated’ work, which alone is final. This is because there is a difference in nature between ‘seated’ exhaustion and the tiredness that ‘lies down,’ ‘crawls,’ or ‘gets stuck.’” And how I wanted to lie down on the bench some afternoons, early evenings. But when this feeling overtook me, instead, Jane Eyrelike, I called things out over the canal.

  Are we not ensouled? Are we not entwined? Have we not made a mark on each other, however slippery the soul might be? We do care for each other, we do! And so on.

  There was no response. No feeling that my words had met another soul, nor Ingrid-Simone’s.

  ***

  What day did I abandon my bench and wander into the Rijksmuseum? I waited in the lineup for a couple of hours. I was drawn to The Kitchen Maid. Vermeer. The light coming in through the window that rests so humbly on the maid’s hands and on the golden front of her dress and on the milk pouring into the bowl. The painting is made of honey rather than paint and canvas; it is made o
f light. She, the painting, is a reminder that all of us are immortal, none of us are ordinary, could we be merely ordinary when the light that we may find ourselves bathed in is the portal to all our innocent secrets? That the light itself is the secret, the way it can hold us, and hold others, those who might be arrested by such an acute glimpse into portals, where the connection of souls may be witnessed. Van Gogh once wondered, how to get inside a star? We are there, standing by a window, doing chores, light easing in, but a light that is interior, the light of the soul, glowing and glowing.

  A couple of nights before I left, I had a dream. In the dream I opened my peacock shopping bag and I took out the miniature purses that Ingrid-Simone made for me. I dropped them down into the canal one by one as a swan skimmed by, surrounded by the purse boats. When they were out of sight, I upended the rest, all the contents of my bag, all the leaves of paper and postit notes, the paper napkins, the chocolatebar wrappers and the small blue reporter notebooks I had filled with notes and thoughts on Ingrid-Simone and the ones inspired by her.

  I returned to teaching in the fall, to take up my PhD again. My heart was mostly in it, though not completely. But perhaps this has made me a better teacher, a better student, because I was better at discerning where and how others were having difficulties with the material, how they could bring more of themselves into it to make the work meaningful. I took the line by Goethe to heart: “If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.” This made all the difference for me. Whereas before I was consumed by my own fear, now I concentrated on the becoming, the birthings, the progress and process of souls, the wolflight that emanated from each being.

  How easily distracted I was that summer in Amsterdam after the winter of I.s. Maybe I stayed on the bench because it was the only place I could hope to keep my mind on her. And what if she had come walking up from behind? Or if I had seen her from my perch in front of the Museum of Bags and Purses? Or if I had been sitting in the café in the Museum eating a bonbon and she had sat at the table with me? Or come upon me when I was looking at the purses for sale in the gift shop? How would I have behaved and what would she have said? I realize that I would have still forgotten or refrained from asking the question. Being there on the bench was not the same as asking the question.

  It’s difficult to hold someone like Ingrid-Simone in one’s mind for any length of time. I already doubt that I knew her.

  And even though it was a dream, I decided the next morning, before breakfast, to enact it. I sensed this was something Ingrid-Simone would approve of. I set sail to her purses, to all my notes, maybe even to my dream. Like in the story of Rumi’s father’s notebook. Rumi’s luminous friend, Shams, interrupts a conversation between Rumi and his students. They’re sitting on the edge of a fountain, and Shams pushes the notebook into the water. “It is time for you to live what you have been reading and talking about. But if you want, we can retrieve the book. It will be perfectly dry. See? Dry.”

  My notes were not so easily retrievable, nor did I, at the time, wish for them to be so. And I haven’t regretted letting them go. But even so, the summer after my first year back in academe, I reconstructed my notes from memory. I tried to be as faithful to my somewhat illegible scribbles, my fragments, as possible. I sat on my balcony that summer with another notebook, a very thick one, with green lines. I wrote down everything I could remember, everything I had scribbled on so many scraps of paper. And then I transferred it to my computer the following summer, so that by now several years have passed.

  I have also painstakingly documented the process of my compulsion, my reconstruction of these scratchings, starting from when I set my notes loose into the Herengracht canal. It began: today I set sail to my winter notes, my I.s. notes, and worse, I sent Ingrid-Simone’s small purses into the thick and impenetrable water because I thought they’d be safest there, heading to the sea, embracing the depths. I’m both proud of this act and ashamed. I heeded my dream and heedlessly spilled them into the immense and incomprehensible stream of life because I knew I couldn’t carry them, they couldn’t be held or carried or contained.

  I wrote about reconstructing my notes in the summer when I was writing about winter. How I had to take an ice cube out of the freezer some days and hold it in my left hand while writing with the other. I felt the cold melting through my fingers and down my bare leg. Sometimes I held a cube of ice on the back of my neck and felt the cold water skating down my spine. I wrote about how the bits of paper floating down the stream would come to me in dreams, how I would see them floating away. They became part of another unconnected dream but when I woke up all I could remember were these scraps floating away from me, by me, through my fingers.

  I wrote about how I conjured these lost notes. Instead of trying to reconstruct them chronologically, I attempted to remember them in categories. First I tried to conjure all the marginalia —the notes that I wrote in the margins of the notebooks or things that I added to a note jotted down on a napkin or a movie stub. Then I worked on remembering the notes I wrote in restaurants, on napkins usually. Then the notes that were on ephemera and in this category I included bill stubs, movie stubs, lottery tickets. Next came the postit notes. Sometimes I could remember what colour the note was on that I wrote a particular observation. Then came the notebooks, first the reporter style notebooks, and then the slightly larger ones.

  I wrote about the space that followed, where I wrote nothing. I wrote about lacunas, those gaps in writing indicated by brackets and ellipses. I filled up pages and pages with them because it seemed the most honest thing to do.

  […]

  […]

  I wrote notes about light. All of those occasions where the light seemed to emanate from beyond. I wrote notes about the soul and sometimes these two categories overlapped. The soul is light. I.s. is light. I wrote down the words, soul, I.s., light.

  Sometimes I wrote about those things that I knew I couldn’t quite remember. There was a glimmer of a memory but I couldn’t quite remember how it had gone. I wrote about how even though I could remember many of the things I notated, I knew that I worded everything differently in my reconstructions. I imagine it was not dissimilar to the process that translators go through, though in my case I was translating memories as faithfully as I could. I wanted to keep the authenticity of the original, but was hampered by my own poor memory.

  And this—all my thoughts on the process of translating air and love and the dark and unknowable recesses of handbags—has ended up being my dissertation, soon to be published by a prestigious university press. Which I suppose seems odd, that the book beside the book of I.s. would be published.

  But I want to leave a copy of this, a reconstruction of the floating fragments and purses and birthings and Ingrid-Simone, the biography of a young woman one winter, the book I couldn’t write and did write, the subject of my dissertation you could say, on the green bench near the Museum of Bags and Purses. I’ll have it bound, a single copy, and take such pains on the cover of the book. I want it to be eyecatching, something that Ingrid-Simone would notice and be delighted by. I want her to know that I understood something of what she was capable of becoming, and is.

  Acknowledgements

  In February of 2011, I convinced my husband Rob, and daughter Chloe, to travel with me to Amsterdam to visit among other museums, the Museum of Bags and Purses which had begun to figure in the book I was writing. I’m grateful to them for journeying with me with such interest and delight, both to Amsterdam, and in life. This book is for them.

  I thank my friends in writing, in particular those who read this in an earlier form. Kimmy Beach, Nina Berkhout, Lee Elliott, Barb Langhorst and Annette Schouten Woudstra. Thank you to Dawn Kresan for a splendid cover. Thank you to Aimee Parent Dunn for being the perfect editor for this book.

  Author Biography

  S
hawna Lemay is a writer, blogger, photographer, and library assistant. She has written six books of poetry, All the GodSized Fruit, Against Paradise, Still, Blue Feast, Red Velvet Forest, and Asking, as well as a book of essays, Calm Things, and an experimental work, Hive: A Forgery. Her first book won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She lives in Edmonton.