On the far side of town, at about the same time, a car had stopped dead in a vacant stretch of road. Its U-bolt had given out.
By the time I got to Main Street, it was too late to do anything I’d planned. So I headed straight for a bar on the ground floor of an old lodging house, where I could read and take notes. I figured I’d stay late, down a warm whiskey, and head home. I was about to leave when an old man with a fiddle walked in and started to play. It was a lovely old country ballad; even the smoke in the bar wanted to stand up and slow-dance.
The young man whose car had broken down had walked all the way into town. He happened to be nearby just then. He was a musician, he heard the fiddle, and he came straight into the bar. And then straight up to me. I rose to dance with him. Right away, with their country smarts, the folks in the bar knew. After the seventh dance, they gave us a room. In that bed we traveled far into rough, sage-spiced country, where sweat is a form of light. The next day I took him home and we talked and made love, made love and talked, read books and walked and watched the stars—for weeks, and then months. We conceived a little girl. We will be together forever, in this world. Sometimes I think, in all the other worlds, as well.
If I had not stopped to watch the hawk, I never would have met him. If his car had not broken down, he would not have stopped at all in town. If not for the fiddle music, I would not have stayed at the bar, and he would not have entered the bar.
No one believes in destiny anymore. But this has not affected destiny itself. No one believes in beauty anymore, but the world is showing itself, beckoning us, hoping for us. No one believes in heaven on earth anymore, and so heaven is freely available.
No one believes in the old, sacred arithmetic anymore. If you add a hawk, a bolt, and a fiddle, what is the sum?
A brief story sent to me by a brilliant woman who lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. It seems to be about her own death. I had asked her to elaborate on her fierce declaration and urgent question: “The evil in the world has literal-mindedness as its root, its poison root. When the prophets condemned idolatry, this is what they meant. When will we learn that lesson? When?”
When in my return letter to her I inquired whether she might portray what she meant in a style with less aggressive metaphor, she asked me if I was willing to do without thumbs.
PENCIL
Once upon a time a woman was much perturbed by friends who took everything at face value. According to them, the meaning of all things in the world was determined by their human use, and not by their jocular, spiritous use.
According to them, a ledge in a canyon is only a place where a human can stand and look, and not the fated step that might be used by a young man to climb into the sky; not the stage where the coyotes go to give voice to the manuscripts of the sandstone; not where the lichen consult with the lowliest rocks, so to add a precise, necessary tracing to the contours of history.
The walk of a woman was only the means by which she could find her way to errands, to work, to a man; this walk of hers, there was no chance it might be her practice of a rhythm of wingbeats she will one day teach to fledgling seabirds; no chance it might be, by the marking of her steps, a celebration of the pattern, on a windy morning, of sunlight moving through the aspen; nor that it might represent, on a city street, her maternal traveling into the newly created country of her young daughter’s stories.
Occasionally our friend would try to trick her friends into the admission that everything is anything but what it seems. She would point out, by way of example, the phenomenon of colors: an object has a given appearance because it absorbs wavelengths of all the colors of light, save one, which it reflects away: and that is what we see. So then, looked at aright, an object, in fact, is full of every color except the color it seems to be. Still, however much our friend persuaded and explained, portrayed and clarified, those around her turned all the more to their own affairs, and regarded her as possessed of a peculiar, unnerving confusion of mind. The idea that human action and vision hold something within; that what we do and see could come consciously to be part of a living pattern of events that is planet-wide and grace-giving—this idea was somehow unfathomable.
So it was that our friend, after a time, died. Or at least she seemed to die, for by following her own rules we might conclude that her death was a gesture that, seen through a prism that shows the wider vision, might be understood aright as a lucid, high-colored movement into the spectrum of another life.
Before she died, she wrote me with an old pencil, which she said was the baton of a conductor of symphonies, a flagpole where moved the colors of an invisible nation; or that it was the needle of a compass that points to a door which opens onto a treasure known, at just the right moment, to a certain reader of a certain book.
She wrote me this very account of herself, which seemed to be a story.
I was told this in the dining car of a train going from San Francisco to Chicago. I longed to talk at length with the storyteller, but she was such a meditative woman that, looking out the window of the train, she fell into a perfect reverie where I was not welcome.
Yet it is in just such reveries that, then as now, I seek to be welcome.
ORIGINAL GRACE AND THE GLORY OF HISTORY
Some have lost their wings because they found them too large, uncomfortable, and bizarre; some, because in use the wings had proved rather unpredictable, as if they had a mind of their own. Some thought it was unjust to have imposed upon them without their consent so conspicuous and intrusive a bodily feature; for others, they disliked the way the wings were situated, after all, on the back, making it hard to sit down at dinner parties—and difficult in any case to see in a mirror, leaving the winged creatures in undeserved anxieties about their elegance and their readiness to fly. For yet others, they considered the wings too ungainly to allow efficient and graceful movement through the human world, with its doors, offices and chairs, hearthstones and banquet tables.
Most of all, the wings were lost because if we accepted them as essential, we would have to do something with them. These are busy times, important work is going forth, the era is full of wealth and possibilities, each generation must have the courage to take upon itself the burdens of history. Who on earth has the time to consider the proper way to bring to the brilliant human endeavor so antiquated and embarrassing a birthright?
In all these judgments we are correct; we have our sound and supported reasons and compelling emotions. After all, what is more important to our story on earth than our own reasons and feelings, and the inalienable right of each of us to exercise the freedom to define his own individuality? It is, in fact, our individual sovereignty and dignity, our pride of place in creation, which is sacred: this, at least, after so many centuries, we have learned.
With our learning has come freedom, and freedom—the wholehearted, open expression of our lives and minds, our work and emotions—will, we know, in the long run, lead us to joy and prosperity. If this were not true, if we are not being led to just such pleasures, then tell me—for heaven’s sake, tell me—who are they? Who are these men holding the ropes attached to the rings in our noses?
Candela lives in San Francisco. She is one of the reasons the city is the way it is. It has been complained recently that the city is getting less strange and more technological. But I think the technology will before long be taken over by the grace-giving strangeness of the place.
I have listened to her stories for hours. I relate these few incidents as plainly as possible. They are selected from the much more idiosyncratic variety of incidents in her life.
THE WAY SHE LABORED
Our friend Candela was a conventional young woman with a soul both wild and calm, both aggressive and subtle. She wanted to participate in the world as she found it, yet she felt that a simple, coarse, stupefied commitment to work could not be justified. In fact, she felt, in general, only one commitment: to tell what truth she knew by the way she lived. In this way, she thought sh
e had a chance to make a home in this life; at least, the ghost of a chance.
In other words, she was just like you and me.
Her first job after she finished her education was the most obvious work she could conceive: she became the understudy of a minister in one of those churches that thinks that women, too, have souls. Unfortunately, she found that the minister had no direct personal experience of God, only a conviction that He might well exist, and that it was a good thing in any case to exhort people to virtue in His name.
What a surprise this was to our Candela! She had thought that having a confirmed dialog with the divine was a fixed prerequisite for such labors. Her own intercourse with God, which she undertook every year in midwinter when it was cold and she needed some of the Holy heat, spark, and jocund company, was something she thought would be very useful in her new job. But her minister, no. He just went on day after day spreading upon the faces of his congregation the marmalade of virtue. So plastered were they by the sticky phrases of the preacher that they could hardly go out in the world to honor his exhortations. For one thing, they had to wash up. What was Candela to do; how was she to get some plain God-talk into this mess?
She hit upon a plan. For the next sermon, she came straight into the church and took up a place in the pews, accompanied by a clothes rack from home, upon which she had hung most of her wardrobe. Because of our heroine’s disinterest in matters of fashion, the hangers contained mostly sweatpants, denims, overalls, hoodies, and funny hats; hence, this was an easy rack to roll about.
As the pastor began one more stem-winding sermon on the necessities of virtue, Candela, in her simple way, listened with ferocity. For every one of his admonitions, she would put on another article of clothing. So numerous were the virtues suggested by her earnest compatriot that before long she had taken on the profile of the fat lady in a circus. Even the good Father could not help but notice that one of his congregation was growing. And so, not recognizing his swollen assistant, he summoned her forth.
Now Candela had to figure out how to move under such a weight of cloth. Taking courage, and slick with a downpour of sweat under her garments, she shuffled out into the nave, waddled to the front of the church, and situated herself directly in front of the pastor, who now understood that this puffy object was his own assistant. He had thought her so sweet and inoffensive. And so she proved to be!
Candela turned slowly to face the churchgoers and said:
“Everything has changed! The good Father and I have been playing tricks, and now the joke’s on you!”
The pastor could do nothing because, of course, the joke was on him.
Candela went on:
“You probably think that in some story you are portrayed as having upon your face the marmalade of virtue: a sweet thing for you to savor on your day of worship. Well, that story will be wrong. The truth is, you leave this church every Sunday covered over with ideas about virtue like so many layers of clothes. You are weighed down by what you want your soul to wear. You must feel just as I feel, standing here. Yet going forth with such bulk is the very opposite of our intention; in fact, we want you to leave here naked, having stripped from yourself the ideas standing between you and this world. For virtue, rightly considered, strips away your own self; it is, in fact, the way you learn to take off the clothes of your soul. Why not see the truth about ourselves?”
The pastor, meanwhile, hearing all this improvisation, was mad as a hen.
“And now I leave you,” she said with a winning smile to one and all.
“But where are you going?” asked the exasperated Pastor.
“To get naked,” she answered brightly.
The next morning after her parable-in-action, she turned up as usual for work at the church, fully expecting anything from a pat on the back to unreserved huzzahs of praise. Instead, she found the Father still so mad his lips were flecked with foam, so mad he could not speak without swallowing his tongue. Seeing this, she sat quietly in hopes he would calm down. But there is a limit on how long a woman is willing to sit with a foaming man; and when someone came in and handed her a paycheck, she got the idea that her performance had not been universally acclaimed.
Yet there was good news in all this: she began to understand that she would have an increasing number of career options.
And so it has proved to be: She has worked as a risk analyst in a financial management firm, a translator of poetry from Italian and Spanish, a waitress in a jazz club, and a cook in a Moroccan restaurant, where she specialized in dishes made with pomegranates or cinnamon (both of which ingredients she used to introduce certain variations in the amorous undertakings of late evening). She has taught in a community college, specializing in the Jewish and Arab poetry of medieval Spain, and is currently engaged in the study of mushrooms and juggling.
In every single job she has proved to be magnificently indispensable. And from every single one she has been fired. She is, therefore, not in the least discouraged.
AFTER ALL, IF each of us is meant to take off the clothes of our soul, then it can only be because, looking into the mirror, we might see ourselves as we really are. And within the sorrow we know so well, within the terrible sorrow that each of us carries, because of our ignorance, because of what we have done—beyond the savagery of every day, the pandering habits of mind and our hysteria of purposes—within and beyond all that, we might find our chance.
Candela is coming to see you.
I have collected these graffiti in bars all over the American West. I caught her carving only once, and then only because she let me. I loved her so much. She could not hold on to a single gift given her, not a single one. She gave them all away again, incorrigibly, and I came to see that she was giving away her whole life, every day. She did so with a calm and potent independence.
GRAFFITI CARVED IN BARTOPS BY A TRAVELING GIRL
People say: where there’s smoke there’s fire; and by this means, many a fire has been found, after which everyone went home contented. History would have been different if they would have stayed, to see what was burning.
He thought he could hear the music of the spheres; but it was the sound of his own soul, laughing at him.
There is no creature lowlier than the professional writer, who must laboriously glue fancy veneer over the cheap and rotten wood of his life.
The woman is a genius: she paints the world that holds her as a brush.
If wildflowers do not take root in your sentences; if the homely has no luster, life looks like flesh and grass looks like grass; if the world throws money for you, and you would play fetch all your earthly years; if you think changing the world is more difficult than changing your eyes—then start over. For heaven’s sake, start over. Do it now.
People who cannot reminisce about the future have no memory.
This story was told to me on the Lower East Side of New York City, by a woman who worked in a pawnshop. Pawnshops, as everyone knows, are hives of stories. The woman you will find here, who bought the compass, is now a judge in New York State, known for the almost-transcendent clarity of her judicial decisions.
THE COMPASS
Some years ago a woman bought a compass in an old pawnshop. She was attracted to this particular compass by the elegant silverwork of the case. This case, in the form of a pentagon, had inscribed upon it a series of interlocking spirals that spun together and revolved apart, gathering sunlight as they moved; it looked as if the metal itself was set moving. These phenomena so entranced the woman that she forgot to open the case and look at the face of the compass before she bought it.
When she came, in good time, to do so, she was dismayed to find on the compass face a whole eccentric series of marked orientations, rather than the usual north, south, east, and west. What is more, the needle on the compass changed its position in a way mischievously unrelated to the magnetic field of the earth—rather, its movements showed a swift, calibrated response to forces and energies otherwise undetectable to our frien
d. She, of course, tried to replace this bizarre instrument; but when she returned to the location of the pawnshop, she found a vacant lot.
At first, she thought she had been cheated. But she was patient with the strange ways of the world, and not excited by intrigue, nor maddened by the impractical. She decided to keep the compass with her.
Months passed. One morning, in the course of a frustrated search for some important papers, she accidentally knocked the useless instrument from her desk, and the case was wrenched open. When she picked it up, she noticed that the needle was pointing to a locked drawer. Sure enough, the lost papers were there, even though it was impossible that they should be so. At this point, however, our friend resolved not to be discouraged by simple impossibilities.
Her compass turned out to have all sorts of uncanny properties. Sometimes in a meeting of people it would point out an honest man, at just that time in the conversation when his clear commentary would be decisive. Sometimes it would indicate whoever knew just the joke that a gathering of people needed in order to understand their own absurdity. One time she was guided by the compass needle to the end of an alley, and through a door she found there, she entered an extraordinary forest, someplace she thought she recognized. She wandered widely, and later fell into company with a family of foxes, and learned their grace, stealth, beauties, and quickness; even as she explained to them the incurious ways of humans.
In another instance she decided to follow, without watching where she was going, the turning of the needle as she walked in her home city. When the needle began to spin, she looked up and found herself in the capital of another country, speaking another language; and thereafter she lived simultaneously in two cities at once. Eventually, she understood that the needle was meant to teach the orientation of hearts; and later she even became able to sense, without consulting her compass, which direction to follow, as she moved down the proper and magical pathways within her days.
The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace Page 5