She couldn’t help herself: there was nothing more ridiculous than large groups of people submitting helplessly to imprisonment within a cellblock of expectation.
We have all heard of impregnable old castles, with their battlements, their crenels and machicolations; but these walls were nothing compared to the invisible walls of social habits and psychological formulae. In the old days, a soldier might pour down a vat of boiling pitch upon the heads of assailants. These days, we have a still-more extraordinary situation: for society is like a walled city with its battlements turned inward, preventing anyone from emerging. Every time our friend tried, her own companions poured upon her a boiling pitch of assumptions, socially endorsed ignominies, and senseless obligations. Most amusing of all, many went through passionate motions of escape, and by this means attracted attention that fixed them all the more firmly within the walls of their culture.
As well we might expect, our friend had a rowdy, subtle solution to this imprisonment. She decided to build a castle of her own. She meant it to be the castle where she could retreat, whenever she was possessed by the solitary genie of her own reflections. And there was an additional and precious benefit: she now had a place where she could invite the people of her choice—those who were willing to play by the rules of learning, improvisation, experiment, good will, and exactitude.
The only problem was location. Easily solved: she would build her castle in exactly that spot named by one and all as the most foolish and irresponsible: she would build her castle in the air.
And a magnificent castle it was, a dwelling place for her most private ideas, her long-constructed hopes, her iridescence of mood, her overwrought variety of demeanor, her jokes that fell like spindrift upon the events of the day. It was a castle with arches and gables, with courtyards and open plains, with rooms of cardboard and rooms of marble. It had rooms full of books, and rooms full of tricks. Some of the books were so full of affection that when they were read they gave the reader the sensation of receiving amorous overtures. In the courtyards of the castle there were jugglers who demonstrated the way it was possible for a woman to keep all her dreams aloft, spinning, headed back always into her hands.
And best of all: as everyone was looking toward this castle afloat above the fortified world where we all live, our friend was able to approach unnoticed the big gates of society. As everyone found a way to visit the world she had made for herself, as they entered and mused, marveled and understood, it became the world she had made for everyone else. As the visitors came to know the books and tricks, the songs and dreams of her castle in the air, she came to know an unprecedented peace. Until at last, down in the walled city of society, her moment come, she slipped out the gates and was gone.
There are those who seek valiant adventures to far reaches of the earth. Yet as any parent will know, simply to conceive and raise a child is the most daring enterprise imaginable. Light streams from an infant, and you understand at once how much will be called from you.
These events occurred in the Kings Mountain region, along the California coast. They were related to me, quietly, by the father of the young girl in the story. It is clear she is making him into what he did not imagine he might be. I convey his account, of course, because his small daughter does not have the time to tell her story herself. She has more important work in hand.
THE ASTROPHYSICS OF CHILDREN
I sometimes have a quickening insomnia, and so I rise to read, or to walk around and try to order the gust of words in my head. It takes me hours sometimes; for it is as if I am blown, like a kite, into far regions of the sky where I have only my hope that the string will hold.
Perhaps because of these odd states of mind, I was not surprised by the gleam I saw coming from beneath the door of my little daughter. I was walking the halls of our house around four in the morning, and there it was, a line of light. Still, it made no obvious sense. She was six years old and had just started first grade. She was so tired at the end of the day it was as if she were carrying a sack of rocks to bed. I had thought that she was tired from school.
I swung open her door and saw her standing by the side of her low table. On the table were three spinning cones of light, lovely, effervescent, irresistible. My daughter was studying them, touching them, shaping them. I stood and watched her, not wanting to interfere. In fact, I wanted to leave, feeling like an intruder in my own child’s room. Then, slowly, she turned and looked at me with her big green eyes. Then she said:
“Zephyrs!”
And I understood all at once. It was a word she had learned recently, used in high desert country where we hike to refer to the whirlwinds of dust that rise from the sand and stones to turn gracefully across the countryside. I suddenly remembered that on the last trip to the desert with my daughter, we had seen seven zephyrs, which was most unusual. They delighted her; by my side, she had been aglow.
At the door of her room, I whispered to her:
“Show me what you are doing—”
There was a long silence. I could hear only the purring of the little zephyrs. It was playful; new, somehow.
“Daddy, goodnight!” she said happily, and I stepped back and closed her door.
The next morning she was uncommonly affectionate. As I took her to school, she had, as usual, her “project box,” which held (we had always been told) her special creations to show her teacher. I could, however, hear the whirring. When I dropped her off, she even winked at me, the little gremlin.
The next time I saw her at work was in the bathtub, in the morning, on a Saturday. For some time she had wanted to bathe herself, which she did happily and at length. After a spell she invited her mother to get in the bath with her, which the two of them loved. Passing by the bathroom, I heard again the same whirring, but this time with a moist, lush savor. I knocked, of course, and she cried out happily:
“Mommy and I have been expecting you! We are ready!”
She had three waterspouts, tiny but distinct, spinning and glistening in the bathtub with her. I remembered that we had promised her that day a trip on a sailboat, out along the shoreline, to visit some coves and bays, have a picnic, watch for whales, whistle for the dolphins. When we left for the harbor later that morning, she took her project box.
By chance, I read the next day in the newspaper about the astonishing waterspouts sighted offshore. There was even a photo taken by an alarmed fisherman, showing three stratospheric, glittering whirlwinds of water moving across the ocean, as if by divine commandment.
She showed me the next project. We live near an open meadow, bordered by a forest of madrone, oak, and redwood. There is a sandy area hidden in a hollow, and she led me there by the hand one Sunday afternoon, to where she had overturned a wooden crate. She lifted it to show me two pairs of small golden stones, each pair set at the head of a compact, closely arranged form made with sinuous lines of bark and leaves. The two forms had a strangely familiar symmetry. And I knew that my insomnia that night would lead me outdoors into the clear night. I confess to a roaring of heart, when I heard two great horned owls calling to each other from low branches in the tanbark oaks.
Her next project needed two years. She had some friends, two other little girls and one lucky boy. They had been playing in the forest every weekend. They told us they had a fort. I glimpsed it from afar, though I knew not to approach until invited.
Each of the four children finally did ask their parents for a picnic, and even now I laugh at the innocence of our acceptance. They had built a shed in the forest, so as to pursue their labors in privacy. Inside they showed us the finished work, set out on the ground. We examined the brilliant arcs in floral beauty around a bright core. They had made it of stones, feathers, paper; in parts it was painted with incendiary colors; in parts it had a sense of tranquil passage, in others a sense of imminent and beautiful catastrophe; in others I heard a kind of atomic hum, as if from a hive of inconceivable powers.
Of course I had promised her a telescope, and
that night, taking turns, we found, in deep space, the turning pinwheel galaxy: perfect, boundless, titanic, inevitable. When the children weren’t gazing at it, they were holding hands.
Afterward, we all went inside to have some hot chocolate.
I tell you all this so that you will have a record of the most obvious and ordinary things that happen to a parent. That is to say, how the life our children have to make may come to make the life we have, to open the gates of our senses, to answer an ancient longing, to unify mind, earth, and sky.
I have spoken with my daughter, in hopes of finding out how I might qualify myself to learn what I might do with the time I have left.
Language, as everyone knows, has sacred origins. To connect with those origins, we must figure out what we mean when we say the simplest thing. This is a story, I am instructed, “told by a woman for other women.” I heard it, privately and unexpectedly, in the New York Public Library. Since that day, it has never been the same, really not at all, to sit down and take up a pen and write any word.
WHAT WE MEAN BY BREAD; AND BY SACRAMENT
These days, people want language to render some yield directly, as though language were a kind of money; as though, in writing and talking, we invest in the world. And it is true that in some ways language is like money; except that when you pay for bread, you get just a loaf; but when you say bread, you get more than a loaf. You get noon light on the wheat fields, the quickness of foxes wandering in the adjoining forest, the hope for the harvest, the history of stories in the hands of the baker; you get all that bread’s venerable associations with heaven, any one of a thousand celebrations at table; you get a living thing that, right there in front of you, may come into amorous concord with the wine and cheese.
Then there is the bakery, with its industry, gossip, moving community, and savory panoramas—all of which is absorbed by the bread you buy. The salt in the bread brings to the loaf the catastrophes of the sea; the butter bears the sweet milk of early morning.
And then, as you bought the bread, there was the man kneading dough under the skylight in the big back room, his forearms covered with flour and his hair disheveled with the joy you have given him each day as you, with your speculative ebullience, stepped into the bakery. He has hazel eyes; he stops to look at you, his hands still in the dough. You realize that the loaf would be decidedly improved in taste if it were not eaten until after you had, in your circumspect way, figured out whether you might rough up this young man in bed.
This culinary speculation, you make known to him. You meet him after work and go home together with old-fashioned grins. He smells like yeast, cinnamon, wheat flour, melted sweet butter. He is shy.
You wonder what he has learned at work.
You find out: afterward you feel kneaded, hot, fragrant, risen, delectable.
So have you made your investment in life and language, you have set forth on your venturing. And although you have your privacy, nonetheless, you and your lover have changed, for all time, one word. The warm afternoon light, the worlds you both brought, the pathways found in one another’s hands; the hot generosity and courage of the two of you, the way your heat savored of allspice, the shared thankfulness; the sense of timing and readiness, the deliverance, the lifetime of teasing and durable joy that began on that day: all now is part of what will be meant always, always, everywhere in the world, each moment in the world, whenever someone says—bread.
Told to me one lazy summer afternoon, when I stopped into a bank in London to talk about online management of certain accounts. My banker has an acrobatic wit, bright azure eyes, and a pierced nose. She was once fired because of the piercing, but then rehired immediately because the bank could not function without her.
THE BANK OF DAYS
Most people are familiar with the banks of finance, which accept deposits, pay interest, and make loans. The money deposited in these banks represents the value assigned to certain limited human efforts, and everyone agrees that this money can be exchanged for goods and services.
It is useful to examine this common phrase—“goods and services”—for it assumes that anything which can be bought by humankind is either good to have or of service to us. By now we have all learned that this is absurdly, and sometimes tragically, far from the truth. And because of this, a new sort of bank has been created: a bank of days.
This new bank does not accept deposits of money, but only of people’s days. When someone has lived a day they think especially amusing, instructive, tasty, or beautiful, they may go to this bank and deposit this day into the common account; for there are no individual accounts at this bank. This is because, as everyone knows, days are not the property of anyone, but belong to the commonwealth of our experience. And so all the deposits in the bank are placed in an account that is held in the name of everyone. The bookkeeping is thus greatly simplified.
Now, this bank cannot, obviously, make loans of money. It does, however, as you may yourself know, loan its days to those judged to be creditworthy, because they may have a legitimate use for amusement, instruction, tastiness, or beauty. The bank has found that the best way to make such loans is not to inform the recipient that she has been loaned a day, but simply to do so, in accordance with management’s policies of selection. The expectation is that the interest of the borrower will be sufficient to compensate the bank for its trouble. Let’s say, for example, that a depositor trusted by the officers of the bank recommends a certain woman for a loan. If all goes well—that is, if the right day is on deposit and the woman can be found—then the whole range of possible experience held within a remarkable day will be loaned her. The value of this day will be increased by the goods the borrower can discover in it and the services she can obtain.
She might, for example, be loaned a day that has in it the sightings of many falcons, who fall out of the sky with a sure, able, lovely swiftness and silence. Because of these sightings, she might discover in this day the value of falcons as a model for the movement of her thoughts, which must, after patient reflection and vigilance, seize gracefully upon the life-giving conclusion. If she is very successful, she might be provoked to some unrelated offbeat discovery; say, that the falcon’s gliding high and still, wings spread, facing into the wind, is meant to teach her how to situate herself, to teach a way of consideration, of reflection, a habit of steadiness—so that she learns, once and for all, how to keep the whole in view. If she learns in just this way, she will, as a matter of course, find the bank and pay back the loan of the day, which, because of the detail of life found in it by the debtor, has increased in value. And, in its changed form, this enriched day can then be loaned to someone else. And before long the day has changed entirely and the bank is considerably enriched.
This is the way the world works. This woman is a real woman. We cannot exaggerate how much we owe her. And how much we owe all the clients of the bank, if in fact they make their faithful repayments.
Such are the wonders of compound interest.
Now, if the woman had found nothing in the day (perhaps she would not even notice the falcons), then the bank receives nothing. This happens now and then because, just as not all loans are repaid, not everyone knows, as they live their days, what on earth to do. Not everyone knows how, in the soil of their hope, there might already be seeds.
So it is that the bank of days takes in deposits and extends its strange loans. You may wonder whether the bank is prospering during these times of ours. But such a question is difficult to answer, because the assets of the bank of days are difficult to measure. We might do well, though, to determine whether our best days are saved in a prudent and responsible way, and whether or not, by our repayment of attention to the splendors we are given, the bank of days will be solvent in the fateful years ahead.
Heard in Kansas in a Laundromat. The teller held forth calmly, though she was pillaged with grief. This story turned me into a student of shadows.
And it confirmed what a number of the other women in t
hese adventures have held to be true: that light has an intelligence of its own, and that it is full of judgments, suggestions, and messages.
ONE LITTLE RECORD OF ONE LITTLE DEATH
I tried to warn him. But, as usual, he wouldn’t believe me. So let me give you a brief account of the exchange and its aftermath—do with it what you will.
He was my brother, and like everyone, he had a shadow. The sunlight, as everyone knows, creates shadows. It is less frequently noticed that the sunlight, which has its own intelligence, is examining us, and inscribing upon the earth what it sees in us. As a result, our shadows contain a cumulative record of our lives. Over time, each shadow takes on a life of its own. In a good life, it brightens; otherwise, it darkens with violent sorrow.
Which leads naturally to my brother, and to the question of his death. I saw his death coming on, and I thought he should do something about it. As our shadows are brightened, so our lives are extended; until finally, if we live so that our shadows disappear, we may be extended infinitely. I tried to show my brother how this might happen, how he might have the chance to find his way to such radiance. And I told him that his heedless and thrilling life held a risk and a terror, because our shadows can darken, take form, and turn upon us.
But he did nothing, except go on over many years seeking excitement, the admiration and approval of other men, and a daring variety of entertainment. And one day, I saw how his shadow had detached itself slightly from his body. I pointed it out to him, the little sliver of light between his foot and the shadow of his foot. It shook him, and he began to dread the morning light. Sure enough, every morning there was more light between his shadow and him. And then all at once his shadow was completely detached. It was seething, crimson, repulsive.
The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace Page 9