The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace

by Steven Nightingale

  Having concluded all this, she wrapped up the emerald with a note of explanation and sent it off to the local newspaper, which was edited by a woman known as one of the most eloquent people in all the world. Our lady knew that her editor friend would figure out how to publish the story of the gem and its message—and so would the idea held in the emerald be carried far.

  She turned from these contemplative labors to her next problem—the pearls. Having figured out the purposes of the emerald, the challenge of the pearls was more tractable. She had long observed that her community (as well as her country—if she could be said to have a country) had seen in recent centuries a melancholy decline in the numbers of visionary men and women active in local affairs. In fact, some thinkers, even many literary critics, had decided that frailty and darkness are dominant in all of us and that imaginative violence is the mark of serious fiction, rather than just a cheap thrill. Pondering the causes of so grotesque an attitude, and their consequence (which is, of course, extinction for us all), she asked herself how she might be of some modest help to her neighborhood using the pearls.

  She had noticed, during the walks she took late at night along the dependable river near her home, that the much-beloved iridescence of the waters had lately lost its vigor. There was a tarnishing, a shading, a resignation: and all at once she knew that this very shining—this flourishing of rivers—was the light we needed just now. It is the shining that moves within us, to undo with brightness the habits of mind that fix our gaze upon the mere appearance of things.

  So was her course set: the pearls had to be dedicated to the river, if the river, and so our sad eyes, were to have any chance to shine with our normal and destined understanding.

  She waited until it was dark. Then, methodically, she gathered up the pearls and carried them out into the night. She followed the path to the river. In their burlap sack the pearls were clackering. Once by the water, she flung them, handful after handful, in long arcs like meteor showers, far out into the current; and she saw them dissolve in the water as it ran faster. As she turned away to return home, she left in the middle of the night the river waters restored, moving like flares from the sun.

  Now nothing was left for her labors, save the tough problems of the rubies and diamonds. Such are the preoccupations of countrywomen. She turned first to the pair of rubies and saw how elegantly cut they were—not at all alike—but yet with some poignant shared symmetry, a balance invisible yet indisputable. And beyond this broad cut of the two stones, she saw that the faces of the gems were incised with a pattern of their own, a pattern that refined the play of light within and between the rubies. This play seemed never to be the same; the light coiled, crossed, vanished: some story was lifted out of the jewels and given away, some hopefulness held true in the movement between those two houses of light. And it occurred to her that, taken together, the two rubies made a fine metaphor for a couple living together and loving well: two hearts close but separate, each sharp-edged with adventures, each marked with a movement of stories compounded of blood and sunlight; and in the devotions of day after shared day, giving all they had—light handed over to life.

  She took the rubies down to the center of her little town, where there was a square used by nearly everyone, on the way to nearly everywhere. And she placed the rubies in a hidden place, side by side on a high ledge of the central fountain where it was customary to sit and talk. There the rubies could exercise their influence. They are still there, and in the countryside stories tell of that little town, whence so many couples have returned, released into the delectation of a liberty they made together.

  Our lady went back home, for she had yet to deal with the diamonds. There were so many! What was to be done? Happily, she thought at once of someone who could decide the proper use of each of these gems, and she gathered them up and wrapped them all together. Then, relaxing, she fixed herself lunch, did some chores; she sang some songs, visited neighbors, told some jokes; and it was already afternoon when she went to town and sent all the diamonds to you.

  This woman made her living telling stories to children in Sikkim, in northern India, where there are parti-colored rhododendron forests.

  She told me this story almost as soon as she met me, as if I had some life-threatening illness she could see, that she could treat with words.

  IF SHE ONCE HAD THE GHOST OF A CHANCE AT UNDERSTANDING

  It is said that to live well, our understanding must engage the world as we do the work of life; yet to do our work, it has been observed that now and again, we must make ourselves distinct from the world. For the understanding that is immersed always in the passing hours, linked with interminable chains of detail and emotion, joined uncontrollably with the current of everyday concerns, will in the long run lose its life, its clarity, its original powers.

  Now, all this once was taught to a woman who, like most of us, had not used her understanding for much of anything in a good long while. She was taught these things, and saved from a terrible fate, by a grocer, a woodworker, and a spider.

  To the grocer the woman said: “What is it that makes possible the consumption of so many varied products of the earth?”

  The grocer said: “It is because knives and forks are not made of food.”

  To the woodworker our friend said: “How is it that you are able to shape woods into so many implements useful to humankind?”

  The woodworker said: “It is because the tools of a woodworker never have a cutting edge made of wood.”

  To the spider she said, as though instinctively trying to revive herself: “What rules do you follow in stringing your cobwebs, the center of your life and work?”

  The spider said: “I attach my cobwebs to stones, rocks, mountainsides, leaves, telephone poles, anything—but not to other cobwebs.”

  For many years I made an annual hike in the Grand Canyon, learning my way slowly into that infinite landscape. It is like walking within the heart valves of the continent. Near Thunder River, which pours like a vision from the canyon wall at the base of the Redwall Limestone, I met the woman—also hiking alone—who told me this story about a friend of hers.

  THE PAINTER OF LIGHT IN THE CANYON OF LIGHT

  One day hiking through the twilight deep in the Grand Canyon, near the Colorado River, our friend Lara met the early Renaissance painter Fra Angelico. Her immediate concern, of course, was that she use the proper form of address to greet such a man. Fra? Papa Angelico? My lucid Beato? After all, he had been dead almost eight hundred years, since his splendid and humble painting in Florence, Fiesole, and Rome. All in all, though, she had to admit he looked rather good. He had cast off his friar’s robes and was clad in denims and a tattered dark green T-shirt, which showed a rather muscular form.

  “Beato,” she said, “would you like to share dinner with me?”

  “And what will you be having, bambina?” he asked graciously.

  “Bourbon, beef jerky, crackers, and cheddar,” she said with trepidation.

  “I’d be delighted,” he said with the savor of a man confirmed in elemental pleasures.

  And as they settled at the bend of the river in a sandy cove, Fra Angelico told her of his new work.

  “You will remember my labors trying to bring together heaven and earth using only oil paints and dry wood; and then, later, the hope and sorrows of the frescos of San Marco,” he said. “I was a messenger of innocent, mindful forms; figures that move by operation of will become an internal circulation of light.”

  “So many now have seen them,” she said.

  “To have seen them is nothing,” he replied softly. “But to have made use of them, to commence a traveling within life—such is the invitation of those paintings. May you go to the place I was myself taken.”

  The Fra leaned back against a beautifully worn limestone slope. Listening to him, Lara could not help but think that there is much to be gained in the company of the voluble, satisfied dead. In fact, it seemed evident that conversation, if it mi
ght have a perfect, rough forthrightness, held its place in a pattern of ideas and events that extended into the next world.

  “And so what are you doing here?” Lara asked brusquely.

  He looked at her with patient bemusement.

  “I am here,” he said. “Or more precisely, I am here and there.”

  “No,” Lara said impatiently, “what are you doing here?”

  “I am being this place,” he said with aplomb.

  They paused in their conversation while Lara mulled this one over. The time passed easily enough in the raw simplicity of the canyon. After her ruminations it was still twilight, and Fra Angelico was still there, looking askance at her.

  “You understand nothing,” he observed cheerfully.

  “My conclusion exactly,” she admitted.

  “In just this part of the canyon, just these days, I am the canyon,” he went on, eating crackers and looking around carelessly. “I was given this job at death, since that is the time when the soul, which during physical life retains its little human preferences, can have the chance, if it is prepared, to take on another form, one apposite to its future labors. Now, you know that in my painting I was the devotee, the aficionado, the flourisher of light; and so did the power that comes to instruct our wandering souls come for me, and grant me a chance to continue my studies here in the canyon. And why here? Well, just look around, young woman! This canyon is one of the few on earth that can serve as a proving ground, a school, a playing field, a pleasance of light. It’s the only place big enough.

  “I live here, work here. I may take on the consistency of stone, that lifts up its head in the weather, to be broken and land in the flashing river and somersault in the currents year after year. I can inhabit a butte, a side canyon, a promontory, rimrock and sheer ledge, or the wall of flowers just beyond a beautiful spring of clear water. And always I am watching the light in all weathers, I am bearing the light and being its student, reflecting, passing on the radiance, working to understand that bright movement which brings this place to the eyes of you who visit here.

  “I can, as I choose, recompose myself as a man, so as to appear to the occasional strange one like you. Also, I like a glass of Barolo now and then. But otherwise I have been here working for eight hundred years.”

  “Eight hundred years!”

  “I have lots of time,” he explained patiently.

  “And so . . .” Lara asked.

  “Soon I will move on to my next task,” he said. “I’d hate to see all this labor go to waste.”

  “What on earth can you do next?”

  “Once I have learned all the silken tricks of light, the foregathering and breakings-through, the deliverance and subtle propositions, the scattering and fantastication of color—once the work is done, and I am qualified, I will myself become light.”

  “For heaven’s sake! No one can become light,” Lara said with authority.

  But then she looked around, and it was dark.

  This story from Acushla is about her youth. She was at the time trying to find the best way for the mind to come into concord with the movement of desire. Or for desire to make its peace with a more permanent and instructive beauty. She has a pacific, capacious soul and an amorous disposition. She lives presently on a farm in Vermont.

  THE SWEETNESS OF LIFE GIVES A GAL ODD HABITS

  Even as a teenage girl, Acushla had concluded that life was sweet; unfortunately, this conviction estranged her from most of her would-be friends, whose hearts careened through the world in a tempest of anxiety. Anxiety was a fascinating thing to Acushla—very unpredictable, a colossus of the psyche—that went brusquely through brain and bones, through intentions, hopes, preferences, decisions, ideas, sweeping all aside in favor of its own preoccupations.

  Acushla, however, thought that it was all a good deal simpler than it looked. In fact, she decided, based on her study of herself and everyone she knew, that anxiety in the human creature had two themes, and two only:

  1) I might not get what I want, or

  2) I might get what I want, and then what will I do?

  As if this were not enough, Acushla noted that these desires often involved other people, who, of course, had their own agendas and anxieties; and so the whole show was made more complex and dangerous than ever.

  Our heroine adopted a simple, rustic technique: labor. She replaced desire with effort, and to hell with the consequences. Instead of wanting bread, for instance, she concentrated on the grain, the salt, the yeast, the butter, the technique, and the labor of baking. If bread resulted, she ate it; if not, she stayed in the school of study and of hunger.

  Instead of wanting a lover, she studied the arts of love, she readied herself for the iridescence of pleasure, she tried to envision a life where word and touch, hope and idea, were made into a gift for someone else, each day, as she lived. And when lovers came into her brilliant days and moved with her through the hot, confident nights, she lived with them, so long as they stayed, in the midmost of the world reserved for lovers who are thoughtful and thankful.

  In other words, Acushla had excised from her life, as one would a tumor, the notion of reward; instead, she gave herself to learning, to readiness; and when a gift came her way, she recognized it.

  Of course, everyone thought she was arrogant because she seemed to know what she was doing, because she was at no one’s mercy, and because she did not bemoan her fate. Some, naturally, even saw her as an uncompromising, distant woman. What they resented is that they could neither control her nor define her.

  She could make stolid friends funny. She could bring to an ignominious phrase an apt metaphor, could disrupt with exultation the august conclusions of men. She could banish the stink of melancholy with the spices of her jokes, her teasing, her hijinx, her shenanigans.

  Acushla, as time went on, as a result of her offbeat initiatives, learned from all the world, and the life in the world. She was able to conceal her abilities within, and so few people knew how she strode through the world with the stealth of a jaguar, she scudded like a cloud, she shone like a crescent moon: that is, only those lucky enough to love her understood her rich, wild mind.

  As she portrayed herself, she was just another run-of-the-mill female living out her life. Just another neighbor.

  Such is her simple story. Now, she admitted that there were many who claimed that work is done only in desire of reward. This, she noted, is the same as thinking that life leads only to death.

  However, if life may lead to life, and (as an additional bonus) death may do the same, it is logically necessary that she continue to live by what she saw as our soul’s first and best joke. Namely, that the only desire that has any reality is to find out what is worth desiring. We need to know. What if, for example, it turns out that we cannot really learn how to want anything until we already have it?

  Heard in the town of Independence, California, from a woman who knows and cherishes Death Valley. She has hiked its somber and hallucinatory canyons for ten years.

  A WOMAN COMING FOR LOVE

  Our friend Clarissa, so beautiful that in her town the sun rose through her room, was thinking one day about the earth sciences, as they relate to our survival; and she came easily to the conclusion that stones have spirits. After all, if you lived for thousands of years, and held in your substance old stories about millenniums of events on earth; if you had found a durable form and a splendid tranquility, how might you want to manifest yourself on earth? What are your real choices?

  Certainly you would not choose the human form—there is no room anymore for such helpful and durable people on earth. In any case, you then would have to go through, more than once, the whole elaborate and theatrical business of pretending to die. And more difficult yet: even if such a woman survived the uncontrollable hatred loosed upon anyone who suggests that a permanent life is worth having, and who has a method for making such a life, she would still be subject to the flattery and curiosity of those who wanted somethin
g from her. And as everyone knows, the admiration of people is as dangerous as their hatred.

  And so it was that Clarissa went to the desert, into a canyon full of stones, so full that just to walk in the big streambed of the canyon set up a maniacal clattering, a bounding and ricocheting all along the rock walls: she felt as if she were participating in an avalanche. But she walked onward, for she was sure that she would find herself in the full company of voluble, informative tricksters.

  Once far enough into the canyon, she sat down on a ledge and surveyed her companions. So did they survey her. She noted immediately that the sounds of her moving up the canyon had been her introduction to the language of stones—a statement of basic phonetics and grammar. But phonetics and grammar, while they have their uses, do not address the real problems of learning a language. It is semantics, the science of meaning, that demands seasoning, lightheartedness, exultations, and steadfast peace—only by possessing such qualities might a woman learn.

  And so it was that our young beauty, who would otherwise have been wielding a jackhammer, a welding torch, a scalpel, or an optical spectrometer, came instead to be deep in a canyon trying to talk to stones.

  Eventually she succeeded. She discovered the ordinary thing: that the land itself sets forth in plain language a whole wild set of useful notions. Using only essential elements, it can teach about essentials only. Instead of using words to convey a meaning, the language of earth must use its most widely available material—that is, it must use rock. In other words, the pursuits of metaphysics, aesthetics, religion: they may be replaced, for some students, by one intensive course in geology. This would simplify many an academic program.