The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace

by Steven Nightingale

  Now, by the time she hit the university, Anisetta was not one to keep mum when a celebration was called for. After all, she loved so many things. She loved particle physics, theology, gin, diesel mechanics, and sexual pleasure. She had good teachers, and a long strong boyfriend named Dominico, who loved to take her home for a lunch of honey, muffins, and sharp cold cider, after which she would take him into a rumpled old brass-framed bed, happily situated under the skylight. And there together they would form long series of integral equations: integrals, as we all know, take constant practice, and must be done with patient, searching attentiveness.

  As the seasons turned, their mathematical expertise increased.

  It was at this unlikely juncture in her life that Anisetta remembered the etiquette of thank-you notes. After all, so much was going on, she had to have a way of keeping track. And so she began sending her notes very promiscuously, to wit: she began thanking people not just for their kindnesses, but for their barbarities.

  To one professor she wrote the following:

  This is just to let you know how grateful I am for allowing me to see you in action. It is your aggressive, rhetorical, daily obsession with yourself that makes you such a well-known academic racketeer. By observing you I have come to understand how, by force of ignorance and self-deception, a man can become a wretched thing, a wasted thing, a vessel of sorrows.

  May your day be fruitful!

  This lighthearted patter was the first of many efforts, in which she specialized in being unwelcome. She had a set form of these epistles, for soul-stunted males, which ran:

  O blubbery thing! Strip the fat from your soul before you suffocate! When will you find the suppleness, the ease, the lithe surety of a lover! And thank you for your preening, self-satisfied thuggery, which has inspired me to seek a life of my own.

  I hope, when I am changed, to find you—changed.

  Anisetta also liked to write to dead people, like Immanuel Kant:

  Immanuel! I like it! Especially that phenomenon/noumenon stuff. Let’s head for those noumena, guy! No prob! You’ve got the words; I’ve got the music. Let’s dance!

  And to Sigmund Freud:

  Siggie! Thanks for being such a snazzy guy! Too bad about the clit envy!

  But most of all, she wrote her thank-you notes to the powers of this earth, like angels, coyotes, hummingbirds; or to the more abstract eminences, like Reason, or Jokes.

  For example, she wrote:

  Dear Reason, zany thing that you are,

  I’m glad you’re around. Some days I’m in love with you, with your panoplies of order, your way of bringing ratio, proportion, exactitude, standards: your way of making sense. When we meditate on something, when we understand how the elements of the world come into necessary, elegant, logical concord, it is a light-making moment.

  On the other hand, you should stop being such a cocky brute, striding about and claiming all the world, the whole world, as your own. Who do you think you are, anyway? You are not the only useful thing on this earth: think, for example, of the common pig.

  Get the message?

  And by these expedients, she soared. And, soaring, she was brought by a course of nature into conclusions about the strange, wild, permanent entitlement of our lives.

  As for me, I could not help but want to know what the whole range of these conclusions was. I know only that she thought her notes were more than a metaphysical joke: she thought she knew at least one of the marks that make a life—the manner of its thankfulness.

  The last I heard from her was this note:

  Dear Dominico,

  Thank you for showing me the advantages of skylights in household architecture. There in the light, during all our lunchtime study hours, we have had one of the securities of love: the way we knew as we walked through cool morning air that we could trust a weather that was in us, such a sweetness—

  I’m leaving tonight, forever. It’s not that I don’t love you; it’s just that our two souls have made something different of this one love. To me, you are a home I must leave, to make the world my own.

  To you, I’m the story you’ll never forget.

  In the dark Where you undress A blooming iris.

  —NOBUKO KATSURA

  Your spirit, do I not know how to please it? Bridegroom, sleep in our house till dawn. Your heart, do I not know how to warm it? Lion, sleep in our house until dawn.

  —A PRIESTESS, CIRCA 2000 B.C.

  Unself yourself.

  —HAKIM SANAI (12TH C)

  For I am the first and the last. I am the honored and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the mother and the daughter.

  —FROM “THUNDER: PERFECT MIND,” A POEM BY A WOMAN LIVING IN THE 3RD–5TH C

  PART III

  Heard in upper New York State from a woman whom I visited seeking help in understanding the plight of a brilliant friend who had been judged insane. He thought he could hear colors. I had given him Rimbaud to read, and some weeks later when I visited him he winked at me. And when I told him this timely story, he looked at me and said, “For the love of heaven tell that woman that she must safeguard what she knows. Most of the world will deny it. From abominable darkness, they will deny it.”

  WHERE IN THE WORLD IS YOUR WORLD

  Our friend Suzanne belonged to the other world, the one that we have all heard about: a trustworthy, forthright, gift-giving world within and beyond our daily affairs. In that place, and only there, she lived knowledgeably, irresistibly. However, Suzanne like the rest of us had to find how she might combine such a world with the momentary world of our practical affairs. In fact, her main task in life was figuring how this integration might occur. To meditate upon such solutions, she took on the habit of walking, and talking aloud, in the forested mountains near her home.

  Mountains, she knew, kept secrets.

  She wished often that the practical world, all the thresh and smolder of daily events, had more to do with the world where she really lived. Sometimes, when by virtue of her honest, needful concentration she would be touched by the energetic reality of the day; or when her work, reading manuscripts at a small publishing house, would align itself with the most delicious influences of the hour, she would feel the very seasons revolve through commonplace phrases. Sometimes when walking in the country she felt so at home, it was as if sparrows could nest in her thoughts.

  When such things happened, she conceived that there might be one day, as it were, a marriage of two worlds, the practical and the real. It would be a marriage that made life whole.

  Unfortunately, such unions were rare, for Suzanne’s time was taken up by the usual considerations, which settled themselves around her like dry branches, slowly burning her to death at the stake of her arrangements. But she was a strong woman. She kept walking in her beloved mountains; she kept working and searching.

  One cold winter day she was sitting with coffee by her window in the morning and she heard the sounds, faint at first, very faint; but she composed herself by means of the coffee and her magisterial heart. She concentrated as the sounds became more distinct. They were very soft, soft as the sound of white mist coming out of an old bottle, before the genie appears.

  She stayed by the window for hours, guessing at the source of such a visitation; then she saw the eagle. Deep in her mountains, in a big pine at the high end of a long canyon, an eagle was ruffling his feathers, lifting them and then all at once releasing them back into place. The sound she heard was this gentle extension and settling-back of countless golden feathers.

  The sound, all the rest of the hour, of the beautiful eagle, carried her deep into the ordinary day; and so, slowly, all that day, the world unbound her mind and her moments with sound. Later she heard the rushing of clear air over the wings of the eagle when it glided down the canyon.

  The whole day changed from within: she would hear something, then have to identify what she heard. She understood that there was a capacity, a speci
al knack of listening; more than attendance to the practice of the world, but a conscious illumination, the making of a place, a time, by movement of understanding—all so that she could know more of what was always present.

  The world referred to her in sound. She heard the intricate percussion of myriad sand grains, carried by waves, as they fell roaring on the beaches of a coast she once had loved. She could hear from distant cities the pulse of children not yet one year old, whose hearts were not yet complicated by failure. She could hear grass grow. She could hear the supple give and resistance of bones in the hand of her neighbor at hard work. She could hear the clouds change color, the silken uproar of underground rivers, the ripening of coffee berries on unknown slopes of mountains in faraway tropical forests. She could hear the musical aging of an old wood house, and the acceleration of sap in the roots of big trees during the clap of thunder. She could hear the coarseness of a lie in someone’s voice.

  And what of the practical world? She saw that the practice of life is just that—practice, and that if we look and listen and work on earth, we might get good at it, quit screwing around, step lively, look askance, find our faces, uncover the midmost of our hopes, take the butcher paper off our hearts—and earn the marvels of a world made permanent.

  As we should. For has it not been said, now and again, by women and children and some few others, that our lives are not separate from the world? Our lives are not separate—we are.

  Told to me near of the top of the island, much loved by Saint Francis, that is in the center of Lago Trasimeno, in Umbria, a region in the center of Italy. This is a site with a primitive church, where the shadows seem to be at play—almost as if they had heard the Canticle of the Sun.

  The storyteller was a former nun married to a former priest. They were both there that day. They seemed aglow.

  WORK MAY BE GOOD FOR SOMETHING

  Once there was a painter who lived in Umbria. She painted rivers, country roads, stone houses; flowers, bridges, fields. This world, she thought in her simple way, was what we see, and more than what we see; what is apparent, and the animate beauty within.

  Years passed, and more years, and the painter became famous, quite beyond her intentions, even beyond her awareness. In the land where she worked, and in countries across the oceans, her work was much in demand, and it sold for remarkable sums. Yet this prosperity meant very little in the daily life of the painter. As she had always, she rose early in the morning and began her beloved work.

  One day after receiving an impressive check in the mail from the sale of a single piece of hers, she started to wonder if some of the buyers paid not so much for the work itself, but for her very name; so that her paintings risked being merely exhibited, rather than being a source of life. And so, one splendid night over a bottle of Sagrantino, she resolved to begin selling her paintings with more craft and anonymity, with a more impish strategy. Her idea was to have them bought by those who saw value in them, beyond the vagaries of reputation and the movements of the marketplace.

  Sometimes she placed her work in galleries under a different name. Sometimes she would sell pieces herself but claim that they were the work of other artists from other countries, or, depending on the style, from another century. Most fun of all, on the days of the big flea market she would gather some household goods and some paintings, and from a booth in the market sell her work for modest offerings to those she saw were examining her canvasses with high-hearted patience and penetrating bemusement. One advantage to such a buyer, of course, was that one day she would discover that the painting on the wall of her little house was worth a treasure fit for a pasha.

  All of this felt inevitable, and so our painter began to wonder how she might extend her mischievous activity. And slowly, as day after day she worked, her meditations concentrated within her, and all manner of ideas and stratagems occurred to her. If she, as a guest in someone’s house or apartment, saw there an order of beauty in formation, she would wait her chance. Then one day she would return when she knew the house was empty, make her way inside, and hang upon a wall just the painting that would perfect and complete the spiritous reality of the place. Other times she would hear about someone under siege, whether friend or stranger, whether celebrated, obscure, or reviled—and if, by intuition, she thought a certain work of hers would bring some solace or necessary exultation or vision of a safe way forward, she would ship them that very painting from an address that didn’t exist.

  Occasionally she still would sell a painting under her own name. Since she was distributing most of her work so eccentrically, her identifiable pieces had become much more rare, and so fetched magnificent prices. And no one of the hundreds of people that found money in their house, or in their mailbox, or deposited in their account, was ever able to trace the funds to the painter, who, hard at work, herself forgot how she distributed her wealth.

  One day she was at work on a still life—a table covered with a white cloth, bearing a wooden bowl full of peaches, a bottle of red wine, a vase of flowers. As she worked, a peace grew in her, and her brushstrokes were swift and wholehearted, and what took form before her had a power beyond anything she had ever done. For hours she painted, until she was exhausted. She ate a brief dinner and dropped into a deep sleep.

  The next morning, full of eagerness, she went to her studio, wanting to give a few final touches to her new creation. Striding to her easel, she saw—a blank canvas. Stunned, she stood rooted and silent. Where was her painting? In desperation she looked around the room, moving aside other canvasses, opening closets, finally roaming through the house. Her still life was nowhere to be found. Had it been stolen? Impossible! What was she to do?

  She stood for a long time in her studio. Then, wanting to recapture the transcendent energies of the previous morning, she began again to paint—this time moonlight on a river that ran under a bridge at the border of her home province. And once more the sense of sharp, remarkable peace possessed her, and her brush moved over the canvas with concision and hope and surety. Once more the hours passed, and, exhausted again but full of joy, she went off to a dark and restorative sleep.

  Once more, of course, the next morning, upon her easel stood a blank canvas.

  She stood a long time, knowing a search would be useless. And then upon the blank canvas she began again to paint, this time an entirely different scene, and her body filled with peace as a jar fills with honey.

  The next morning, confronting yet another blank canvas, she set to work again. And so it was for days on end.

  One evening she was invited to a dinner in Rome, and with her friends in the Eternal City she joked and told stories and proposed toasts. After dinner a stranger stopped by their table. He looked vaguely familiar, being known, and then only slightly, to one of their company. The stranger invited them all home for an after-dinner grappa. It was not until our painter had settled into a soft chair in the comfortable home of their host, not until she had sipped her grappa and had a chance to look around, that she noticed the side table. It was small, covered with a white cloth. Upon it was a wooden bowl full of peaches, a bottle of red wine, a vase of flowers.

  It was exactly as she had painted it—the arrangement on the table, the label on the wine, the color of the flowers, the texture of the cloth, the slanting of the light—exactly.

  The shock of it seized her. She could say nothing. Not much later her friends, thinking her tired, took her off to her rooms.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, as she passed from Tuscany into Umbria, she could not help but notice the moonlight under the bridge.

  Later, back in her studio in her stone house in a small village, she stood before the blank canvas, bewildered. To what work was she called?

  And a voice from Beyond said: “Did you think that Creation was once and forever and final? It is not. A part of Creation is renewed every day, and depends upon the hidden ones, the necessary ones, the messengers.

  “You are called now to such labor. With your brush, you must
paint the world into place. You must do the work that turns into the world.”

  SHE STOOD QUIETLY for a long time. Then, knowing she was going to work all night, slowly she took in hand a fine brush she had never used. She found on her palette, as she knew she would, the deep gold she needed. She stepped to her canvas, and in thanks, savoring every fateful stroke and radiant line, she began to paint the movement of morning light over the soft and blessed countryside of Italy.

  I was in love over twenty-five years ago with a brilliant, daring woman who, wisely, left me. And so I was delighted to come across her many years later at a flea market in Oakland, California, where she sold used books, specializing in haiku, cookery, and painting—especially Persian miniatures.

  She told me this story almost as soon as I saw her. It was her way of catching up. She refused to say anything more.

  THE CASTLE IN THE AIR

  Once there was a rebellious woman. She found that it was delightful to challenge the social conventions of her day, and she took an impish pleasure in doing so. Convention, she saw, is largely a matter of expectation; and so when people expected to engage her in, say, a tender and grave exchange of confidences, it was just then she felt herself at her most rowdy and acerbic. When gritty, seething tension was called for, she put on an air of saucy lethargy. When indolence was mandated, she was piping with energy. When at a banquet, and expected to be decorous, she was a roustabout and a maniacal joker. More than once she managed to have herself thrown out of solemn, distinguished gatherings for her ebullient skepticism.