Sometimes, when the letters lay hidden and he had to search his memory, a vision would come to him of the bruise-colored stain at his bedroom window. It was an image like a snare, holding his thoughts close and tight, and to see his way past it was like the tussling of an animal.
It was a sky-blue spring morning when the type founder carved the finishing stroke of his final letter: a capital I. He blew the shavings of wood from his desk and watched them float into the air. Then he went to wash his hands in the basin. When he came back, the line of the sun had moved from the edge of his desk to the carpet, casting his type case in a haze of black shadow. He repositioned the case in the light against a wall and stepped back to take a look. Its cells were filled, its hinges glinting—A through Z and a through z in roman and italic, all the marks of punctuation and all the marks of reference.
Every character was complete, filed neatly in its drawer, and he drew a satisfied breath, feeling as new of heart as a flourish of wedding confetti. That afternoon, he thought, he would button himself into his vest and jacket, fasten the clasps of his type case, and carry it to the foundry. It wouldn’t take long to produce a plaster mold, and afterward to cast his work in lead and in antimony. He might walk home as early as nightfall, his arms heavy with metal type. Then he would prepare a stew for himself, with meat from the butcher and greens from the grocer, and he would hold the letters in his hand as he ate, testing the heft of them one by one, their satisfying coolness and the fineness of their grooves.
As these words went rolling through him, the type founder followed the slant of the sun across his storage case. And though it took him a moment, he noticed something there that brought his thinking to a halt.
The light moving over the rows of type had pulled at the darkness and glare of the letters: certain hollows had grown deeper, certain angles had grown sharper, certain flags and descenders now shone as white as day. The image they formed in their turns of light and shadow became clearer as he squinted away the details. It was the face of a woman, her head cast slightly to one side. A strand of hair fell over her cheek, and she was staring as if into a great distance. It was like the shape of a cloud in an oncoming rainstorm, both distinct and illusory, and he recognized that it was nothing more than a product of his own dreaming vision. All the same, he would have watched it until evening struck, but a short time later a flock of birds disrupted the sunlight. The image rippled in their passing and then vanished from his sight.
When he left his house that afternoon, he thought that he was setting out for the foundry. His jacket and vest were buttoned close and his type case was swinging in his hands. But at the corner by the large blue-brown climbing stone, where the road into town met the road to the river, his feet remembered a different path.
He found himself standing alongside the water, first beneath a walnut tree and then on the bank where he used to walk with his wife. A couple of children were marking the soil with long sticks, and an old man nearby stooped to inspect the cuff of his pants. A butterfly floated along the shoreline with its otherwordly wings. It was only when the type founder saw a mother lifting her baby from a carriage, heard her pat the space between his shoulders with a “hush-a” and a “there, there,” that he realized his mistake: it had something to do with aspiration, and neglect, and the river that was flowing past him, and the choice to walk there unaccompanied, and he felt his own foolishness rise up inside him and send a frost through his body.
Then, sick with the weight of his thoughts, he shaped that foolishness into a wish, cupped that wish for a moment in his hand, and sailed it into the water like a stone.
And who’s to say that such gestures are without consequence, that our hopes and petitions can have no influence in this world? The type founder knew as if it were the clearest of his memories what he would see when he got home and opened his front door. He set his type case against a tree—it was finished now, and he no longer needed it—and he started up the riverbank. Then, thinking better of it, he turned back and gave the case to the woman who was coddling her baby. “Alphabet blocks,” he explained, “for the child.”
He made his way along the cobbles as swiftly as he could, and arrived at his porch with the sting of the walk still burning in his lungs.
His wife was in the living room, her back to him, running her finger through a line of dirt at the window: it was just as he had wished it, just as he had seen it. He opened his mouth to speak and his throat made a rustling noise. “Sometimes—” he began, and she turned to look at him from the window. He stood in the open doorway and a small wind slipped around him. Sometimes we have the wrong dreams, he was going to finish. I’m sorry, he was going to say. But his wife gave a little smile, a freshet of red in her cheeks, and rubbed the dirt from her hands with her blouse.
“I know,” she said, nodding. “I know.” She gestured around the room, where currents of dust were swirling in the spring air. “We’ve got some work to do here, don’t we?” she asked, and the look on her face was a sign that welcomed him home.
The Jesus Stories
And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.—John 21:25
This is one story: Jesus, the son of Mary, born by law into the house of Joseph and by custom into the line of David, but whose true father, the Holy Spirit, was engendered of no one, went out into the world to find his people. In the hills beyond Jerusalem he met Satan, who said to him, “I am Man’s Prince, and you are Man’s Son, and we are of a kind, you and I. These stones can be as bread to us. These cities can be as beds. Everything you see here is your home.” But Jesus answered him, “You are not of my family,” and departed from him into Galilee. There he gathered around him twelve disciples, and he lived with them for many years, telling them stories and supposing them to be his brothers. But they did not understand him, for they were not of his family, so in time he sent them away. He was called to a wedding in Cana one day, where he met his mother. Seeing her, he was filled with sorrow, for though she embraced him as a son, even she did not truly know him. She was of this world, and he was of another. “Woman,” he said, “what have I to do with you?” When he died on the cross, he died between strangers.
This is another story: At Golgotha, the place of skulls, Jesus was crucified, and wrapped in linen, and sealed into the earth, and this might have been the end of him, but it was not. It is given to each of us to experience everything. This is God’s secret, the invisible truth that gives shape to our lives: everything we are capable of knowing, feeling, and suffering, we will. Jesus, being God, was capable of infinite experience, and so he returned to this world, every part of him, to finish living his life. His anger caused the earth to shake and ripped the veil of the temple. His joy sent a clean wind whistling through the trees. His sorrow went walking through empty rooms, smothering candles and moaning like a spirit. His body appeared to his disciples on the road to Emmaus, and their eyes were opened, and they knew it to be him. And though his body was carried into heaven, the rest of him—the anger, the sorrow, the joy—remained behind. Every ghost story is another chapter of the Gospels.
The N. are a religious people, converted to the Christian faith by early Jesuit missionaries; they are steadfast in their commitment to the church, if unorthodox in their application of its creeds. It is the purpose of this report to provide a brief account of the conversion of the N. and to examine the key artifact of their culture: the pleocanonical Gospels, or, as they are more popularly known, the Jesus Stories. I have spent the last five years studying these texts, and while I have not yet finished my review of them, I believe that I am in a position to submit my preliminary findings.
First, I shall briefly discuss the conversion. Tradition tells that when the Jesuit missionaries first appeared to the N., gliding from out of the sunlight beneath an array of white sails, the people mistook their ship for a giant bird, and we
re astonished when it gave up to the sea a host of tiny men. A tribal document describes this first encounter: “The men rowed ashore and spoke to us in a strange tongue. They came clothed in heavy robes, which they would not remove, even though the heat of the sun was upon us. They wore crosses on lines around their necks. ‘What place have you traveled from?’ we asked them, and they answered, ‘God has sent us to you,’ a phrase which sounded like a riddle or a proverb in our tongue1and so made us laugh.”
We know that the missionaries stayed with the N. for many months, as long as three years, introducing them to the customs of the church. “They gave us wine to drink, and read to us from a book they carried. They sprinkled our heads with water they collected in coconut shells.” The missionaries slowly learned the N. language, and in time they were able to participate with the N. in their storytelling ceremony, the central ritual of the tribe. Every evening, after the sun had dropped, the people would gather around the common fire and exchange stories—true stories and legends, folk tales and fantasies, the saga of Bird and Lizard, the romance of the sun and the moon. Ten or twelve of the N. would speak each night, taking privileged seats within the ring of stones, and when the final voice had gone silent, the teller of the best story would extinguish the common fire and the N. would sit in the coal-light and ponder his tale.
The stories the missionaries told were new to the N., and the N., it is reported, were shocked to discover that the missionaries actually believed them. From a tribal document: “They told us about Noah and the parade of animals. They told us about Joshua commanding the sun to stand still. They told us about Jonah and the whale, Elijah who would not die, Jesus arising from his tomb and flying. We were solemn when they finished. The insects were loud in the trees.”
Within a year, schoolbooks inform us, the N. were all Christians.
The things I describe happened long ago, of course. N. is a modern country now, a nation of the world, with glass buildings and highways and libraries, just like our own. Though the people still perform a version of the storytelling ceremony during the four seasonal holidays, it is only a shadow version, enacted when their families gather around the table to eat. A candle or a lantern replaces the common fire, and the youngest member of each family is permitted to blow out the flame and make a wish. In this and other ways, the N. honor their heritage. They fast once a year, on the day the sea turtles climb ashore to mate, and on the day their eggs hatch, digging their way up through the sand, they feast. They hold a festival of kites each spring to remember the missionaries who sailed to their land (as the annual Kite Day speech declares) “like a bird from out of the sunlight.” And on their thirty-third birthday, for a month or a year, they take a sabbatical from their jobs and families to write their stories of the life of Jesus.
It is these stories—the Jesus Stories—which are the central achievement of the N. culture. They are regarded as a treasure by church scholars and anthropologists, and are kept bound and cataloged in the Gospel Archives of the N. National Library. I have read over 14,000 of them in the progress of my research, and I can testify to both their great pinwheeling surface variety and their deeper unity of vision.
Many of the stories take as their genesis incidents described in the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Christ’s forty days in the wilderness is a popular point of commencement, with the dual attraction of his fasting and his temptation. There are stories that relate his dialogue with Satan, that depict his hunger visions and the weakening of his body, and one which hints that he in fact died in the wilderness and only then became revealed to himself as God. Various stories concentrate on his castigation of the Pharisees, his healing of the sick, his burial and resurrection, his grief on the Mount of Olives. There are new treatments of each of his miracles and parables, lending to them a thousand different shades and nuances. One story takes as the defining episode of Jesus’s life the killing of the children of Bethlehem precipitated by his birth—an incident that the story designates “the slaying of the ten thousand,” recalling perhaps the song of the women of Israel: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” It suggests that the record of the days of Christ (and, subsequently, of Christianity) is one of blood and suffering, that the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem left a mark on Jesus’s life that could not be erased. It provides a detailed account of the crucifixion, lasting several pages, and also describes the subsequent torture of the apostles. It concludes with a litany of the deaths of the saints. The final line is one of the most famous in N. literature: “Spare us, O Lord, the pain of your turning away.”
Another story inspired by the same incident tells of a Bethlehem schoolteacher who spends two years in an empty school building waiting for her next class of children to come of age. Called the Teacher’s Story, it was written only a decade ago and became hugely popular among the N. A mass-market printing by a major publisher spent upwards of thirty weeks on the national best-seller list.
It is not unusual for the more visionary of the Jesus Stories to take their own places within the Biblical tradition of the N., adding to Christian mythology and touching off new stories, not unlike the Gnostic Gospels of Saint Thomas and Mary Magdalene. The Story of the Slaying, for instance—mentioned above—is widely believed to be the source material for the Teacher’s Story: both depict characters found nowhere else in the Gospel accounts (Thaniel the merchant; the angry Samaritan) and both make use of the same epigraph, from Matthew 3:10: “And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees.” Another example, perhaps more telling, is that of the Young Man Stories. In the early years of this century, a tailor from the coast of N. wrote an account of the life of Jesus that centered on the young man who followed him when he was taken by the soldiers at Gethsemane, an incident mentioned briefly, and exclusively, in the Gospel of Mark.2The story presents the young man as an angel of the Lord, at hand to witness the fulfillment of the prophecies. A second tale, written a few years later, gives the young man a more robust role in the drama, as an angel who is present at Gethsemane to release Christ, should he ask, from his duties as the Messiah. This story opened the floodgates. Later versions depict the young man as a thirteenth apostle, as one of Christ’s brothers, as his adopted son by Mary Magdalene. The most recent addition to the Young Man Stories suggests that he was Christ himself, traveling during the days of his burial to revisit the events of his life. This story grafts the young man like a bud onto the central episodes of the Gospels, and it takes as its main token the linen cloth that he wore at Gethsemane, suggesting that this was the selfsame cloth that Jesus later (earlier?) cast off in his tomb.
Though many of the N.’s stories attempt to elaborate upon incidents mentioned in the Scriptures, others more closely resemble the folk tales and fantasies of the early storytelling ceremonies. Most of these tales take place between Jesus’s twelfth birthday and his immersion at the age of thirty in the river Jordan, a span of years for which there is no record in the Bible. One, for instance, tells of Christ’s journey to the Americas, where he lives with the native inhabitants and develops into his manhood. Another tells of his transformation into a bear by the demons of Hell, who, though they cannot destroy him, are able in this way to conceal him from himself: in this story, Jesus wanders as a bear for many years, “bedding in the caves, eating of the trees and streams,” before he sees his reflection in the eye of a dove and remembers who he is. Another story tells of his descent into the Great Sea to deliver his teachings to what the text calls “the people of the water,” or “the people of the ocean.” A hero tale in the classical tradition, it presents Jesus as a man of adventure, favored by God, who helps the people of the water do battle with the beast Leviathan. Upon his leaving, the people furnish him with an amulet that will give him power over the water and the creatures of the sea: “We give you this gift, O Man of Earth, so that you might summon the fish from their hiding pools, and multiply them for food; so that you might still the tempests, and calm the waters, a
nd walk with ease upon them.” Certainly the members of the N. who first listened to the testimony of the Jesuits were struck by the fantastic—and often miraculous—nature of their accounts, for many of the earliest of the Jesus Stories are built on just such fantastical transformations as this.
It would be impossible in this preliminary report to provide a comprehensive record of the writings of the N., for their literature presents to the reader a boundless variety of stories, as inexhaustible as the imagination of mankind, which is the imagination of God. The following, then, is only a small sampling of the Gospel Archives’ most recent acquisitions:
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