That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  Here the widow heard me falter.

  “Please,” she commanded, and I saw creeping in her face the completed turn of a sneer.

  “‘– lest I be depleted of potency at that moment (which might occur in any interval, even, I assumed, in my own bedroom) when I should encounter one of the free souls. I was borne back again and again to the fetid viscosities of the Inlet, borne there as if on the rising stink of my own enduring and tedious putrefaction, the idea of which I could no longer shake off – I envisaged my soul as trapped in my last granule, and that last granule itself perhaps petrified, never to dissolve, and my soul condemned to minister to it throughout eternity! It seemed to me my soul must be released at once or be lost to sweet air forever. In a gleamless dark, struggling with this singular panic, I stumbled from ditch to ditch, strained like a blind dog for the support of solid verticality; and smacked my palm against bark. I looked up and in the black could not fathom the size of the tree – my head lolled forward, my brow met the trunk with all its gravings. I busied my fingers in the interstices of the bark’s cuneiform. Then with forehead flat on the tree, I embraced it with both arms to measure it. My hands united on the other side. It was a young narrow weed, I did not know of what family. I reached to the lowest branch and plucked a leaf and made my tongue travel meditatively along its periphery to assess its shape: oak. The taste was sticky and exaltingly bitter. A jubilation lightly carpeted my groin. I then placed one hand (the other I kept around the tree’s waist, as it were) in the bifurcation (disgustingly termed crotch) of that lowest limb and the elegant and devoutly firm torso, and caressed that miraculous juncture with a certain languor, which gradually changed to vigour. I was all at once savagely alert and deeply daring: I chose that single tree together with the ground near it for an enemy which in two senses would not yield: it would neither give nor give in. “Come, come,” I called aloud to Nature. A wind blew out a braid of excremental malodour into the heated air. “Come,” I called, “couple with me, as thou didst with Cadmus, Rhoecus, Tithonus, Endymion, and that king Numa Pompilius to whom thou didst give secrets. As Lilith comes without a sign, so come thou. As the sons of God came to copulate with women, so now let a daughter of Shekhina the Emanation reveal herself to me. Nymph, come now, come now.”

  “‘Without warning I was flung to the ground. My face smashed into earth, and a flaky clump of dirt lodged in my open mouth. For the rest, I was on my knees, pressing down on my hands, with the fingernails clutching dirt. A superb ache lined my haunch. I began to weep because I was certain I had been ravished by some sinewy animal. I vomited the earth I had swallowed and believed I was defiled, as it is written: “Neither shalt thou lie with any beast.” I lay sunk in the grass, afraid to lift my head to see if the animal still lurked. Through some curious means I had been fully positioned and aroused and exquisitely sated, all in half a second, in a fashion impossible to explain, in which, though I performed as with my own wife, I felt as if a preternatural rapine had been committed upon me. I continued prone, listening for the animal’s breathing. Meanwhile, though every tissue of my flesh was gratified in its inmost awareness, a marvellous voluptuousness did not leave my body; sensual exultations of a wholly supreme and paradisal order, unlike anything our poets have ever defined, both flared and were intensely satisfied in the same moment. This salubrious and delightful perceptiveness excited my being for some time: a conjoining not dissimilar (in metaphor only; in actuality it cannot be described) from the magical contradiction of the tree and its issuance-of-branch at the point of bifurcation. In me were linked, in the same instant, appetite and fulfilment, delicacy and power, mastery and submissiveness, and other paradoxes of entirely remarkable emotional import.

  “‘Then I heard what I took to be the animal treading through the grass quite near my head, all cunningly; it withheld its breathing, then snored it out in a cautious and wisp-like whirr that resembled a light wind through rushes. With a huge energy (my muscular force seemed to have increased) I leaped up in fear of my life; I had nothing to use for a weapon but – oh, laughable! – the pen I had been writing with in a little notebook I always carried about with me in those days (and still keep on my person as a self-shaming souvenir of my insipidness, my bookishness, my pitiable conjecture and wishfulness in a time when, not yet knowing thee, I knew nothing). What I saw was not an animal but a girl no older than my oldest daughter, who was then fourteen. Her skin was as perfect as an eggplant’s and nearly of that colour. In height she was half as tall as I was. The second and third fingers of her hands – this I noticed at once – were peculiarly fused, one slotted into the other, like the ligula of a leaf. She was entirely bald and had no ears but rather a type of gill or envelope, one only, on the left side. Her toes displayed the same oddity I had observed in her fingers. She was neither naked nor clothed – that is to say, even though a part of her body, from hip to just below the breasts (each of which appeared to be a kind of velvety colourless pear, suspended from a very short, almost invisible stem), was luxuriantly covered with a flossy or spore-like material, this was a natural efflorescence in the manner of, with us, hair. All her sexual portion was wholly visible, as in any field flower. Aside from these express deviations, she was commandingly human in aspect, if unmistakably flowerlike. She was, in fact, the reverse of our hackneyed euphuism, as when we say a young girl blooms like a flower – she, on the contrary, seemed a flower transfigured into the shape of the most stupendously lovely child I had ever seen. Under the smallest push of wind she bent at her superlative waist; this, I recognized, and not the exhalations of some lecherous beast, was the breathlike sound that had alarmed me at her approach: these motions of hers made the blades of grass collide. (She herself, having no lungs, did not “breathe”.) She stood bobbing joyfully before me, with a face as tender as a morning-glory, strangely phosphorescent: she shed her own light, in effect, and I had no difficulty in confronting her beauty.

  “‘Moreover, by experiment I soon learned that she was not only capable of language, but that she delighted in playing with it. This she literally could do – if I had distinguished her hands before anything else, it was because she had held them out to catch my first cry of awe. She either caught my words like balls or let them roll, or caught them and then darted off to throw them into the Inlet. I discovered that whenever I spoke I more or less pelted her; but she liked this, and told me ordinary human speech only tickled and amused, whereas laughter, being highly plosive, was something of an assault. I then took care to pretend much solemnity, though I was lightheaded with rapture. Her own “voice” I apprehended rather than heard – which she, unable to imagine how we human ones are prisoned in sensory perception, found hard to conceive. Her sentences came to me not as a series of differentiated frequencies but (impossible to develop this idea in language) as a diffused cloud of field fragrances; yet to say that I assimilated her thought through the olfactory nerve would be a pedestrian distortion. All the same it was clear that whatever she said reached me in a shimmer of pellucid perfumes, and I understood her meaning with an immediacy of glee and with none of the ambiguities and suspiciousness of motive that surround our human communication.

  “‘Through this medium she explained that she was a dryad and that her name was Iripomoňoéià (as nearly as I can render it in our narrowly limited orthography, and in this dunce’s alphabet of ours which is notoriously impervious to odoriferous categories). She told me what I had already seized: that she had given me her love in response to my call.

  “‘Wilt thou come to any man who calls?” I asked.

  “‘All men call, whether realizing it or not. I and my sisters sometimes come to those who do not realize. Almost never, unless for sport, do we come to that man who calls knowingly – he wishes only to inhabit us out of perversity or boastfulness or to indulge a dreamed-of disgust.”

  ‘“Scripture does not forbid sodomy with the plants,” I exclaimed, but she did not comprehend any of this and lowered her hands so that my words w
ould fly past her uncaught. “I too called thee knowingly, not for perversity but for love of Nature.”

  “‘“I have caught men’s words before as they talked of Nature, you are not the first. It is not Nature they love so much as Death they fear. So Coryľyľyb my cousin received it in a season not long ago coupling in a harbour with one of your kind, one called Spinoza, one that had catarrh of the lung. I am of Nature and immortal and so I cannot pity your deaths. But return tomorrow and say Iripomoňoéià.” Then she chased my last word to where she had kicked it, behind the tree. She did not come back. I ran to the tree and circled it diligently but she was lost for that night.

  “‘Loveliness, all the foregoing, telling of my life and meditations until now, I have never before recounted to thee or any other. The rest is beyond mean telling: those rejoicings from midnight to dawn, when the greater phosphorescence of the whole shouting sky frightened thee home! How in a trance of happiness we coupled in the ditches, in the long grasses, behind a fountain, under a broken wall, once recklessly on the very pavement, with a bench for roof and trellis! How I was taught by natural arts to influence certain chemistries engendering explicit marvels, blisses, and transports no man has slaked himself with since Father Adam pressed out the forbidden chlorophyll of Eden! Loveliness, Loveliness, none like thee. No brow so sleek, no elbow-crook so fine, no eye so green, no waist so pliant, no limbs so pleasant and acute. None like immortal Iripomoňoéià.

  “‘Creature, the moon filled and starved twice, and there was still no end to the glorious archaic newness of Iripomoňoéià.

  “‘Then last night. Last night! I will record all with simplicity.

  “‘We entered a shallow ditch. In a sweet-smelling voice of extraordinary redolence – so intense in its sweetness that even the barbaric stinks and wind-lifted farts of the Inlet were overpowered by it – Iripomoňoéià inquired of me how I felt without my soul. I replied that I did not know this was my condition. “Oh yes, your body is now an empty packet, that is why it is so light. Spring.” I sprang in air and rose effortlessly. “You have spoiled yourself, spoiled yourself with confusions,” she complained, “now by morning your body will be crumpled and withered and ugly, like a leaf in its sere hour, and never again after tonight will this place see you.” “Nymph!” I roared, amazed by levitation. “Oh, oh, that damaged,” she cried, “you hit my eye with that noise,” and she wafted a deeper aroma, a leek-like mist, one that stung the mucous membranes. A white bruise disfigured her petally lid. I was repentant and sighed terribly for her injury. “Beauty marred is for our kind what physical hurt is for yours,” she reproved me. Where you have pain, we have ugliness. Where you profane yourselves by immorality, we are profaned by ugliness. Your soul has taken leave of you and spoils our pretty game.” “Nymph!” I whispered, “heart, treasure, if my soul is separated how is it I am unaware?”

  “‘“Poor man,” she answered, “you have only to look and you will see the thing.” Her speech had now turned as acrid as an herb, and all that place reeked bitterly. “You know I am a spirit. You know I must flash and dart. All my sisters flash and dart. Of all races we are the quickest. Our very religion is all-of-a-sudden. No one can hinder us, no one may delay us. But yesterday you undertook to detain me in your embrace, you stretched your kisses into years, you called me your treasure and your heart endlessly, your soul in its slow greed kept me close and captive, all the while knowing well how a spirit cannot stay and will not be fixed. I made to leap from you, but your obstinate soul held on until it was snatched straight from your frame and escaped with me. I saw it hurled out onto the pavement, the blue beginning of day was already seeping down, so I ran away and could say nothing until this moment.”

  “‘My soul is free? Free entirely? And can be seen?”

  “‘Free. If I could pity any living thing under the sky I would pity you for the sight of your soul. I do not like it, it conjures against me.”

  “‘My soul loves thee,” I urged in all my triumph, “it is freed from the thousand-year grave!” I jumped out of the ditch like a frog, my legs had no weight; but the dryad sulked in the ground, stroking her ugly violated eye. “Iripomoňoéià, my soul will follow thee with thankfulness into eternity.”

  “I would sooner be followed by the dirty fog. I do not like that soul of yours. It conjures against me. It denies me, it denies every spirit and all my sisters and every nereid of the harbour, it denies all our multiplicity, and all gods diversiform, it spites even Lord Pan, it is an enemy, and you, poor man, do not know your own soul. Go, look at it, there it is on the road.”

  “‘I scudded back and forth under the moon.

  “‘Nothing, only a dusty old man trudging up there.”

  “‘A quite ugly old man?”

  “‘Yes, that is all. My soul is not there.”

  “‘With a matted beard and great fierce eyebrows?”

  “‘Yes, yes, one like that is walking on the road. He is half bent over under the burden of a dusty old bag. The bag is stuffed with books – I can see their ravelled bindings sticking out.”

  “‘And he reads as he goes?”

  “‘Yes, he reads as he goes.”

  “‘What is it he reads?”

  “‘Some huge and terrifying volume, heavy as a stone.” I peered forward in the moonlight. “A Tractate. A Tractate of the Mishnah. Its leaves are so worn they break as he turns them, but he does not turn them often because there is much matter on a single page. He is so sad! Such antique weariness broods in his face! His throat is striped from the whip. His cheeks are folded like ancient flags, he reads the Law and breathes the dust.”

  “‘And are there flowers on either side of the road?”

  “‘Incredible flowers! Of every colour! And noble shrubs like mounds of green moss! And the cricket crackling in the field. He passes indifferent through the beauty of the field. His nostrils sniff his book as if flowers lay on the clotted page, but the flowers lick his feet. His feet are bandaged, his notched toenails gore the path. His prayer shawl droops on his studious back. He reads the Law and breathes the dust and doesn’t see the flowers and won’t heed the cricket spitting in the field.”

  “‘That,” said the dryad, “is your soul.” And was gone with all her odours.

  “‘My body sailed up to the road in a single hop. I alighted near the shape of the old man and demanded whether he were indeed the soul of Rabbi Isaac Kornfeld. He trembled but confessed. I asked if he intended to go with his books through the whole future without change, always with his Tractate in his hand, and he answered that he could do nothing else.

  “‘Nothing else! You, who I thought yearned for the earth! You, an immortal, free, and caring only to be bound to the Law!”

  “‘He held a dry arm fearfully before his face, and with the other arm hitched up his merciless bag on his shoulder. “Sir,” he said, still quavering, “didn’t you wish to see me with your own eyes?”

  “‘I know your figure!” I shrieked. “Haven’t I seen that figure a hundred times before? On a hundred roads? It is not mine! I will not have it be mine!”

  “‘If you had not contrived to be rid of me, I would have stayed with you till the end. The dryad, who does not exist, lies. It was not I who clung to her but you, my body. Sir, all that has no real existence lies. In your grave beside you I would have sung you David’s songs, I would have moaned Solomon’s voice to your last grain of bone. But you expelled me, your ribs exile me from their fate, and I will walk here alone always, in my garden” – he scratched on his page – “with my precious birds” – he scratched at the letters – “and my darling trees” – he scratched at the tall side-column of commentary.

  “‘He was so impudent in his bravery – for I was all fleshliness and he all floppy wraith – that I seized him by the collar and shook him up and down, while the books on his back made a vast rubbing one on the other, and bits of shredding leather flew out like a rain.

  “‘The sound of the Law,” he said, “is m
ore beautiful than the crickets. The smell of the Law is more radiant than the moss. The taste of the Law exceeds clear water.”

  “‘At this nervy provocation – he more than any other knew my despair – I grabbed his prayer shawl by its tassels and whirled around him once or twice until I had unwrapped it from him altogether, and wound it on my own neck and in one bound came to the tree.

  “‘Nymph!” I called to it. “Spirit and saint! Iripomoňoéià, come! None like thee, no brow so sleek, no elbow-crook so fine, no eye so green, no waist so pliant, no limbs so pleasant and acute. For pity of me, come, come.”

  “‘But she does not come.

  “‘Loveliness, come.”

  “‘She does not come.

  “‘Creature, see how I am coiled in the snail of this shawl as if in a leaf. I crouch to write my words. Let soul call thee lie, but body …