“You are not rude,” Ambrose said. “I enjoy your curiosity. It’s merely that I’m uncertain how to offer you a satisfactory answer. One does not wish to lose the fondness of people one admires by revealing too much of oneself.”
So Alma released the topic, hoping, perhaps, that the subject of madness would never be mentioned again. As though to neutralize the moment, she brought out a book from her purse and attempted to read. The carriage was too jolting for comfortable reading, and her mind was much distracted by what she had just heard, but she pretended to be absorbed in her book regardless.
After a long while, Ambrose said, “I have not yet told you why I left Harvard, those many years ago.”
She put the book away and turned to him.
“I suffered an episode, Alma,” he said.
“Of madness?” Alma asked. She spoke in her customary direct way, although her stomach fell in fear at how he might reply.
“It may have been. I’m not certain what one would call it. My mother thought it was madness. My friends thought it was madness. The doctors believed it to be madness. I myself felt it was something else.”
“Such as?” she asked, again in her normal voice, although her trepidation was mounting by the moment.
“Possession by spirits, perhaps? A gathering of magic? An erasure of material boundaries? Inspiration, winged with fire?” He did not smile. He was quite serious.
This confession gave Alma such severe pause that she could not reply. There was no place in her thinking for the erasure of material boundaries. Nothing brought more goodness and assurance to Alma Whittaker’s life than the heartening certainty of material boundaries.
Ambrose regarded her carefully before continuing. He looked at her as though she were a thermometer or a compass—as though he were trying to gauge her, as though he were choosing a direction in which to turn based entirely on the nature of her response. She endeavored to keep alarm from her face. He must have been satisfied with what he saw, for he went on.
“When I was nineteen years old, I discovered a collection of books in the Harvard library written by Jacob Boehme. Do you know of him?”
Naturally she knew of him. She had her own copies of these works in the White Acre library. She had read Boehme, though she never admired him. Jacob Boehme was a sixteenth-century cobbler from Germany who had mystical visions about plants. Many people considered him an early botanist. Alma’s mother, on the other hand, had considered him a cesspool of residual medieval superstition. So there was considerable conflict of opinion surrounding Jacob Boehme.
The old cobbler had believed in something he called “the signature of all things”—namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity’s betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator’s love. This is why so many medicinal plants resembled the diseases they were meant to cure, or the organs they were able to treat. Basil, with its liver-shaped leaves, is the obvious ministration for ailments of the liver. The celandine herb, which produces a yellow sap, can be used to treat the yellow discoloration brought on by jaundice. Walnuts, shaped like brains, are helpful for headaches. Coltsfoot, which grows near cold streams, can cure the coughs and chills brought on by immersion in ice water. Polygonum, with its spattering of blood-red markings on the leaves, cures bleeding wounds of the flesh. And so on, ad infinitum. Beatrix Whittaker had always been scornful of this theory (“Most leaves are shaped like livers—are we meant to eat them all?”), and Alma had inherited her mother’s skepticism.
But now was not the time to speak of skepticism, for again Ambrose was reading Alma’s face. He was searching her expression most desperately, it seemed, for permission to proceed. Again, Alma kept her countenance impassive, although she felt much disturbed. Again, he proceeded.
“I know that the science of today takes issue with Boehme’s ideas,” he said. “I understand the objections. Jacob Boehme worked in the opposite direction of proper scientific methodology. He lacked the rigor of orderly thinking. His writings were filled with shattered, splintered, mirror-fragments of insight. He was irrational. He was credulous. He saw only what he wished to see. He overlooked anything that contradicted his certainties. He started with his beliefs, then sought to make the facts fit around them. Nobody could rightly call that science.”
Beatrix Whittaker could not have said it better herself, Alma thought—but again, she merely nodded.
“And yet . . .” Ambrose trailed off.
Alma gave her friend time to collect his thoughts. He was quiet for such a long while that she thought perhaps he had decided to end there. But after a long silence, he continued: “And yet Boehme said that God had pressed Himself into the world, and had left marks there for us to discover.”
The parallel was unmistakable, Alma thought, and she could not help but point it out. “Like a printmaker,” she said.
At these words, Ambrose spun to look at her, his face flooded with relief and gratitude. “Yes!” he said. “Precisely that. You understand me. You can see what that idea would have meant to me, as a young man. Boehme said that this divine imprimatur is a kind of holy magic, and that this magic is the only theology we will ever need. He believed that we could learn to read God’s prints, but that we must first swing ourselves into the fire.”
“Swing ourselves into the fire,” Alma repeated, keeping her voice neutral.
“Yes. By renouncing the material world. By renouncing the church, with its stone walls and liturgies. By renouncing ambition. By renouncing study. By renouncing the desires of the body. By renouncing possessiveness and selfishness. By renouncing even speech! Only then could one see what God had seen, at the moment of creation. Only then could one read the messages the Lord had left behind for us. So you see, Alma, I could not become a minister after hearing of this. Nor a student. Nor a son. Nor—it seemed—a living man.”
“What did you become, instead?” Alma asked.
“I tried to become the fire. I ceased all activities of normal existence. I stopped speaking. I even stopped eating. I believed that I could survive on sunlight and rain alone. For quite a long while—though it seems impossible to imagine—I tell you that I did survive on sunlight and rain alone. It did not surprise me. I had faith. I had always been the most devout of my mother’s children, you see. Where my brothers possessed logic and reason, I had always felt the Creator’s love more innately. As a child, I used to fall so deeply into prayer that my mother would shake me in church and punish me for sleeping during services, but I had not been sleeping. I had been . . . corresponding. Now, after reading Jacob Boehme, I wanted to meet the divine even more intimately. That is why I gave up everything in the world, including sustenance.”
“What happened?” Alma asked, once more dreading the answer.
“I met the divine,” he said, eyes bright. “Or, I believed I did. I had the most magnificent thoughts. I could read the language hidden inside trees. I saw angels living inside orchids. I saw a new religion, spoken in a new botanical language. I heard its hymns. I cannot remember the music now, but it was exquisite. Also, there was a full fortnight when I could hear people’s thoughts. I wished they could hear mine, but they did not appear to. I was kept joyous by exalted feeling, by rapture. I felt that I could never be injured again, never touched. I was no harm to anyone, but I did lose my desire for this world. I was . . . unparticled. Oh, but there was more. Such knowledge came into me! For instance, I renamed all the colors! And I saw new colors, hidden colors. Did you know that there is a color called swissen, which is a sort of clear turquoise? Only moths can see it. It is the color of God’s purest anger. You would not think God’s anger would be pale and blue, but it is.”
“I did not know that,” Alma admitted, carefully.
“Well, I saw it,” Ambrose said. “I saw halos of swissen, surrounding certain trees, and certain people. In other places, I saw crowns of benevolent light where there
should have been no light at all. This was light that did not have a name, but it had a sound. Everywhere I saw it—or, rather, everywhere I heard it—I followed. Soon after that, however, I nearly died. My friend Daniel Tupper found me in a bank of snow. Sometimes I think that if winter had not come, I might have been able to continue.”
“Without food, Ambrose?” Alma asked. “Surely not . . .”
“Sometimes I think so. I do not claim it to be rational, but I think so. I wished to become a plant. Sometimes I think that—just for a very short while, driven by faith—I became a plant. How else could I have endured two months with nothing but rain and sunlight? I recalled Isaiah: ‘All flesh is grass . . . surely the people is grass.’”
For the first time in years, Alma remembered how, as a child, she had also longed to be a plant. Of course, she had been a mere child, wishing for more patience and affection from her father. But even so—she had never actually believed that she was a plant.
Ambrose went on. “After my friends found me in the snowbank, they took me to a hospital for the insane.”
“Similar to where we just were?” Alma asked.
He smiled with infinite sadness. “Oh, no, Alma. Not at all similar to where we just were.”
“Oh, Ambrose, I am so sorry,” she said, and now she felt thoroughly sickened. She had seen more typical hospitals for the insane in Philadelphia, when she and George used to commit Retta to such houses of despair for short periods of time. She could not imagine her gentle friend Ambrose in such a place of squalor and sorrow and suffering.
“One need not be sorry,” Ambrose said. “It has passed. Fortunately for my mind, I have forgotten most of what occurred there. But the experience of the hospital left me, forever after, more frightened than I had been in the past. Too frightened to ever again experience full trust. When I was released, Daniel Tupper and his family took me into their care. They were kind to me. They gave me shelter, and offered work for me to do in their print shop. I hoped that perhaps I might be able to reach the angels once again, but through a more material manner this time. A safer manner, I suppose you could say. I had lost my courage to swing myself into the fire once more. So I taught myself the art of printmaking—in imitation of the Lord, really, though I know it sounds sinful and prideful to confess that. I wanted to press my own perceptions into the world, though I have still never made work as fine as what I wish it to be. But it brings me occupation. And I contemplated orchids. There was comfort in orchids.”
Alma hesitated, then asked, not without discomfort, “Were you ever able to reach the angels again?”
“No.” Ambrose smiled. “I’m afraid not. But the work brought its own pleasures—or its own distractions. Thanks to Tupper’s mother, I began eating again. But I was a changed person. I avoided all the trees and all people whom I had seen tinted by God’s angry swissen during my episode. I longed for the hymns of the new religion I had witnessed, but I could not remember the words. Soon after that, I went off to the jungle. My family thought it was a mistake—that I would encounter madness there again, and that the solitude would harm my constitution.”
“Did it?”
“Perhaps. It is difficult to say. As I told you when first we met, I suffered fevers there. The fevers diminished my strength, but I also welcomed them. There were moments during fever when I believed I could nearly see God’s imprimatur again, but only nearly. I could see that edicts and stipulations were written into the leaves and vines. I could see that the tree branches around me were bent into a disturbance of messages. There were signatures everywhere, lines of confluence everywhere, but I could not read them. I heard strains of the old familiar music, but I could not capture it. Nothing was revealed to me. When I was ill I sometimes saw glimpses of the angels hidden inside the orchids again—but only the edges of their raiment. The light had to be pure, and everything quite silent, even for that to occur. Yet it was not enough. It was not what I had seen before. Once one has seen angels, Alma, one is not satisfied with the edges of their raiment. After eighteen years, I knew that I would never again witness what I had seen once—not even in the deepest solitude of the jungle, not even in a state of deluded fever—and so I came home. But I suppose I will always long for something else.”
“What do you long for, precisely?” Alma asked.
“Purity,” he said, “and communion.”
Alma, overcome with sadness—and also overcome by a jarring fear that something beautiful was being taken away from her—took all this in. She did not know how to bring Ambrose comfort, though he did not seem to be asking for it. Was he a madman? He did not seem a madman. In a way, she told herself, she should feel honored he had entrusted her with such secrets. But such alarming secrets! What was one to make of them? She had never seen angels, or witnessed the hidden color of God’s true anger, or swung into the fire. She was not even entirely certain what that meant—to “swing into the fire.” How would one do it? Why would one do it?
“What plans do you have now?” she asked. Even as she spoke these words, she cursed her plodding and corporeal mind, which could think only in terms of mundane strategies: A man has just spoken of angels, and you ask him his plans.
But Ambrose smiled. “I wish for a restful life, though I am not convinced I have earned it. I am grateful that you have provided me with a place to live. I enjoy White Acre enormously. It is a sort of heaven for me—or as close as one can reach to heaven, I suppose, while still living. I am sated by the world, and wish for peace. I am fond of your father, who does not seem to condemn me, and who permits me to stay. I am grateful to have work to produce, which brings me occupation and satisfaction. I am most grateful for your companionship. I have felt lonely, I must confess, since 1828—since my friends first brought me out of the snowbank and back into the world. After what I have seen, and because of what I can no longer see, I am always somewhat lonely. But I find that I am less lonely in your company than I am at other times.”
Alma nearly felt she would cry when she heard this. She considered how to respond. Ambrose had always given so freely of his confidences, and yet she had never shared her own. He was brave with his admissions. Although his admissions frightened her, she should return his bravery in kind.
“You bring me respite from my loneliness, as well,” Alma said. This was difficult for her to confess. She could not bear to look at him as she said it, but at least her voice did not waver.
“I would not have known that, dear Alma,” Ambrose said kindly. “You always appear so stalwart.”
“None of us is stalwart,” Alma replied.
* * *
They returned to White Acre, back to their normal and pleasant routine, but Alma remained distracted by what she had been told. Sometimes when Ambrose was busy working—drawing an orchid or preparing a stone for lithographic printing—she would watch him, looking for signs of a sickly or sinister mind. But she could see no evidence of it. If he was suffering from, or longing for, spectral illusions or uncanny hallucinations, he did not reveal this, either. There appeared no evidence of a distempered reason.
Whenever Ambrose glanced up and caught her looking at him, he would merely smile. He was so guileless, so gentle and unsuspecting. He did not seem wary of being watched. He did not appear anxious to hide anything. He did not seem to regret what he had shared with Alma. If anything, his deportment toward her was only warmer. He was only more appreciative, more encouraging, and more helpful than before. His good temperament was ever so fixed. He was patient with Henry, with Hanneke, with everyone. At times he appeared fatigued, but that was to be expected, for he worked hard. He worked as hard as Alma did. Naturally he would be fatigued at times. But otherwise he was much the same as before: her dear, unguarded friend. Nor was he seized by excessive religiosity, not so far as Alma could tell. Aside from his dutiful appearances with Alma at church every Sunday, she never even saw him in prayer. In every way, he appeared a good man at peace.
Alma’s imagination, on the other
hand, had been raked up and kindled by their discussion during the journey home from Trenton. She could not put any of it into sense, and she longed for a cogent answer to this puzzle: Was Ambrose Pike mad? And if Ambrose Pike was not mad, then what was he? She had trouble swallowing marvels and miracles, but she had equal trouble regarding her dear friend as a bedlamite. So what had he seen, during his episode? She herself had never met the divine, nor had she ever longed to meet it. She had lived her life committed to a comprehension of the real, the material. Once, while having a tooth pulled under the influence of ether, Alma had seen dancing stars inside her mind—but this, she had known even at the time, was the normal effect of the drug upon one’s wits, and it did not cause her to ascend into the gearworks of heaven. But Ambrose had not been under the influence of ether or any other substance during his visions. His madness had been . . . clearheaded madness.
In the weeks following her conversation with Ambrose, Alma often woke in the night and crept down to the library to read the volumes of Jacob Boehme. She had not studied the old German cobbler since her youth, and she tried now to approach the texts with respect and an open mind. She knew that Milton had read Boehme, and that Newton had admired him. If such luminaries had found wisdom in these words—and if someone as extraordinary as Ambrose had been so stirred by them—then why not Alma?
But she found nothing in the texts that aroused her to a state of mystery or wonder. To Alma, Boehme’s writings were full of extinct principles, both opaque and occultist. He was of the old mind, the medieval mind, distracted by alchemy and bezoars. He believed that precious stones and metals were imbued with power and divine virtue. He saw the cross of God hidden in a slice of cabbage. Everything in the world, he believed, was an embodied revelation of eternal potency and divine love. Each piece of nature was a verbum fiat—a spoken word of God, a created utterance, a marvel made flesh. He believed that roses did not symbolize love, but in fact were love: love made literal. He was both apocalyptic and utopian. This world must soon end, he said, and humanity must reach an Edenic state, where all men would become male virgins, and life would be joy and play. Yet God’s wisdom, he insisted, was female.
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