The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace

by Steven Nightingale

  But what of the resemblances of things? Where is the language that, in the finest gradations, sets out the labor, the tricks, the forthright beauty and authority of likeness?

  How does heaven resemble earth? What does the passage of starlight have to do with the movement of desire? Does the curl of a flower petal in the morning match the unfolding of an idea in the imagination of a child? Is the silence in a big dry canyon like the silence in the eye of a hurricane in mid-ocean?

  When the light falls on the body of the woman you love, and her skin shines with sweat, why is the whole world illumined by that shining, why is that world the homeland you recognize at last?

  THE LOCATION OF the soul, the character of god, the current of resemblance that unifies this world and all others: these are three subjects. Think of them as a band in a bar: a lead guitar, a bass, drums. They need a fourth, a singer.

  Step right up.

  A story about a carpenter, told by a carpenter. She lives on the coast of Maine, and she built the most beautiful sailboat I have ever seen. After she told me this story, I wondered about the uses of its beauty. And to what destinations she might sail.

  THE CARPENTER OF THE HEART

  Once upon a time there was a woman who was carpenter of the heart. She could, by means of her constructions in rare woods, change the very cardiac inclinations of those who saw her work. For instance, by inlaying rosewood, ebony, and birch in a subtle pattern, a tabletop she created could cause certain people to remember all their dreams, and to know how the threads of those dreams are meant to be spun into the tapestry of daily affairs.

  Another time, she designed a chair that made humans honest: everyone who sat in this chair and talked could not stop themselves from telling the truth. She made, as well, a little house no bigger than a breadbox that elves could not resist. All someone had to do was to take this little house and put it in a bedroom, and soon enough they would be able to talk privately to the elves who would make it their permanent residence. Now elves, of course, are ancient and enduring projects of the earth and carry a high energy of heart; like most of the important things in our lives, they are generally thought to be unreal. But even so, they give all sorts of outrageous, mantic, useful advice about a life that is within this life.

  Now it was necessary for our carpenter friend to keep secret what she had discovered about the possibilities within carpentry, for her strange, happy work was not understood by every friend and neighbor. So most people thought she was an ordinary carpenter, and that her hands held not the saga of her blood and her humor and our future. When she died, almost no one mourned her.

  The pieces of work, of course, remain. Here and there you may find a tabletop of ingenious, unnerving inlay, a chair of uncanny, graceful lines, or an extraordinary little house. It was the hope of the carpenter that these and other pieces of hers would be found, and that people would eventually use them to explore her methods, and apply them to their chosen, daily, ordinary labors—so that one day we might see mechanics hard at work in a repair shop for every model of the heart, mathematicians proving theorems with uncanny axioms offered by the heart, farmers tending rich soil found only in the garden of the heart. Now, we may ask, what would such people really do?

  It’s difficult to say. What do you do?

  These paragraphs were written out for me by a novelist in London. She is the only writer I know to publish under three different pen names; for each name, she has a different writing style and preferred genre. She is famous under two of those names. She has concealed successfully her identity for over three decades.

  WHAT SHE TOLD ME ABOUT WHY SHE WRITES

  The writer’s task is just a fantastical way to get set for annihilation in the dark of sod. Luckily, this can be done by just going along, barreling along, galumphing into the future with no more knowledge than a rutabaga of what might happen to you.

  So it’s a good thing rutabagas can be grown in gardens, because it demonstrates what, with care and cultivation, might still be possible for us.

  Whatever happens, one thing is certain: We will be called on to remember what we were, how we grew, whether we made the least effort to produce anything that counts. And what tender shoots we put forward into the next world. And whether we were visited with a blessing: after long labors, to look in the mirror and see nothing, nothing at all. If we were so lucky, in that mirror we could see a world full of strangers, and know once again our longing for their fortune, their thriving, the presence in them of powerful beauties. We have our one chance and our one life to love them with language. And we have our chance to do so, because work in language, with time, is anonymous.

  THERE IS NOTHING more homely than writing—it is an old-fashioned preparation for, as Rumi said, annihilation in the light of God. Luckily, this can be done as a natural part of the day, as sentences form within you in any corner grocery store, in an old car puttering down the highway, or while shoveling horse manure, tending bar, or just shuffling around the streets, mulling things over.

  To put it another way: if you want to write in hopes that your phrases might be tasty to the mind and useful to the spirit of your reader, then you better be ready to go out and get some down-and-dirty, honky-tonk, wide-ranging, classical education: you have to write after dipping your pen in spice pods filled with clear distillations of wild good books, filled with rainwater, whiskey, salty residue of tide pools, sacramental wine, olive oil, sweat, pond water in wilderness canyons, the elixir of life. With such ink, your language will be plain, clear, direct.

  TO TAKE ANOTHER approach entirely: write so that in this world, a couple in love will want to cook with your work, find some place for you, some minute nourishment in what you have done; to use you as one ingredient in a dish that they are making for one other, as a gift to one another, given freely, given without expectation.

  Whatever they cook, it is their lives they taste. What they taste comes from the kitchen, from what they think, what they read, how they praise, the way they give thanks. So is work in language a prayer: and it may be that from the shelf, every now and then, you have been one of the hundreds of items taken down, and that, in the smallest way, briefly, occasionally, when it makes sense in the recipe, you can be of use to them, serve them, please them, make them smile, be present only in your vanishing. But still you can hope for them, love them.

  What matters, of course, is that the meal is forgotten, and that the two lovers go—easy, fragrant, teasing, mellifluous—off to bed.

  What matters is that only they matter—the two of them, the spark in the one, the kindling of heaven in the other.

  Heard in bed, in a cabin in the rain forest on the island of Dominica, of the Lesser Antilles, in the Caribbean. For some, the arts of love include the arts of pillow talk.

  The island has more extensive cover of rain forest than any of the other islands in the region, and it has brightly colored, phosphorescent pools that border a boiling lake.

  IN THE HOT CLIMATE OF PROMISES AND GRACE

  A woman’s languor in bed in the morning by the sea in the tropics—what beauty does not belong to her?

  On the island, far in the forests, currents of rainwater burst over ledges to fall into big cool deep green pools.

  She knows this.

  She laughs to think how generally it is conceived that lovemaking is an instinctual, private indulgence; a full bolt of merely physical rapture. In fact, such pleasures are of so entirely distinct an order that they should have another name entirely, to mark them out more vividly—a name to clarify the way, by such embraces, life may be recomposed. Or a name that we must invent, even as we reinvent ourselves, as a natural part of our coming home to a commonwealth we make together.

  They are themselves, these moments, more than us. They are, she thinks, a trustworthy wildfire of detail, reverence, adoration—of reunion and remembrance. They hold our chance to learn how to tease each other at last out of our lives. They are the way for us to witness in an hour the story o
f years—how we might fuse lights held within so that flesh is lost unexpectedly, in fateful visitation—our vanishing together.

  Lovers’ antics—a theatre for two in which each helps the other practice the joinery of body and soul—our one undressed rehearsal. A clown-show with allspice and silence. A simple question with a thousand and one improvised and classical answers. A ragtag, roughed-up, nitty-gritty music. Mischief, experiment, a future, our peace—

  Her lover turns to her, comes close, smiles at her. He asks her what, in her languor, she has been thinking.

  She tells him everything, and then says: “I’ve figured out why love is never named as one of the sacraments: it’s because it includes all the others.”

  AFTERWORD

  There comes a time when, after many travels, a man needs to be at home. This is especially so if that home is somewhere he might, as it were, travel in place.

  In such travels, I remember every day the women whose friendship and mischief have made me the man I am: that is, the women in this book. My good fortune is to have listened to many more of their stories; you have here a rather small selection. Yet I trust that now you have a sense of the work—and the play—of these women.

  Why did clay turn to an opal in that woman’s hand?

  A movement of dragonflies in the afternoon sunlight of a river canyon: are they writing in air the names of the myriad stars in the minds of children?

  Is that a pinwheel galaxy in the garden?

  IF I MIGHT state the obvious: I have provided these stories not just so that you know about these women. I wanted them to know about you. This introduction having been made, I leave you in one another’s company.

  NOTES

  PART I

  PHOTO

  An image, from 1857, of a woman who may well be Emily Dickinson, the greatest poet in American history, and one of the greatest in world history, with an unparalleled range of subject, a powerful and legendary diction, and a bold, radiant form. The image was discovered in the Amherst College Special Collections and has been the subject of intense scholarly debate and study.

  QUOTES

  Neruda: #14 from 20 poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, in his Obras Completas, 1957, published by Losada.

  On Dickinson: the complete works of Emily Dickinson now exist in two separate editions, the first edited by Thomas H. Johnson, published in 1951, and a more recent edition, in 1998, edited by R. W. Franklin. Dickinson’s poems have different numbers in each edition. This quote is from poem #1069 in the Johnson edition, and #1125 in the Franklin edition. Both editions are published by Harvard University Press.

  The quote from Kafka is aphorism #14 in the series of numbered aphorisms, each of them on separate sheets of paper, and found among the writer’s papers. I read it in the Shocken edition, 1970, in the book The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections.

  Frank Cushing was an American anthropologist who traveled to New Mexico with John Wesley Powell in the late 1800s, and decided to stay with the Zuni. He lived in their pueblo from 1879 to 1884 and received the name “Medicine Flower.” The quote is from his book Zuni Fetiches, written in 1883, and published by the Smithsonian Institution.

  PART II

  PHOTO

  Émilie du Châtelet, born in 1706, was the daughter of a courtier of Louis XIV and was educated in languages, science, and mathematics. She was the translator of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica into French and was a formidable physicist in her own right, even correcting some of Newton’s errors. She had a husband, and many lovers, among whom was Voltaire. The pair lived together for a number of productive years at her chateau in Lorraine.

  QUOTES

  Yu Xuanji was a courtesan and Taoist teacher in China in the 9th C. This verse is taken from the book Women in Praise of the Sacred, 1994, edited by the poet Jane Hirshfield and published by HarperCollins.

  Li Qingzhao was a poet and artist in China in the early 12th C. Her work is now celebrated wherever poetry is read and studied. This quote is also from Women in Praise of the Sacred.

  Emily Dickinson’s letter to her sister is from 1864, during a spell of years in which Dickinson wrote in what can only be called a torrent of genius. It is in her Selected Letters, 1958, Harvard University Press.

  Rabia el-Adawia was a Sufi saint of the 8th C. This quote is from the 2015 edition of The Way of the Sufi, by Idries Shah, published by the Idries Shah Foundation in London.

  PART III

  PHOTO

  Mary Wollstonecraft, born in 1759, began an independent life at the age of nineteen after suffering for years in a household ruled by an abusive, irresponsible father. She was a writer, translator, and original thinker, and in 1792 published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, an extraordinary, decisive advance in thinking about woman’s rights and human rights. She had two children out of wedlock and married both of the men who had fathered her children.

  QUOTES

  Nobuko Katsura was a modern Japanese poet and a specialist in haiku. She died in 2004. This poem is taken from the book Love Haiku, 2015, translated and edited by Patricia Donegan with Yoshie Ishibashi, and published by Shambhala.

  The verse from ancient Sumer is probably by Kubatum, a priestess. The lines, according to Jane Hirshfield in Women in Praise of the Sacred, celebrate the devotions of Kubatum’s marriage to the king, in a sacred rite recalling the marriage of Inanna and Damuzi.

  Hakim Sanai was a Sufi poet who lived in Afghanistan in the 12th C. The line is from his book The Walled Garden of Truth, 1974, Octagon Press, translated by David Pendlebury.

  “Thunder: Perfect Mind” is a long poem found in the Nag Hammadi Library, 1988. The poem is translated by George W. MacRae, in the revised edition of these Gnostic scriptures edited by James M. Robinson, and published by Harper and Row.

  PART IV

  PHOTO

  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was born around 1651 in Mexico. She grew into a beautiful young woman of lustrous intelligence and turned down many marriage proposals in order to devote herself to a life of study. In 1667, she began her life as a nun, assembled thereafter a considerable personal library, and studied both theology and the poets of the Golden Age in Spain. She was a poet, scholar, dramatist, and passionate defender of the right of women to seek knowledge, write verse, and practice philosophy. She is celebrated as the first published feminist in the New World.

  QUOTES

  Ikuyo Yoshimura is a prize-winning contemporary Japanese poet, a professor of English, and head of the Evergreen circle, a group whose writers compose haiku in English. This quote is from Love Haiku.

  Shakespeare’s line is from Act 1, scene i, of Measure for Measure.

  Nawab Jan-Fishan Khan was a warrior and Sufi sage who lived in the 19th C. This quote is taken from The Way of the Sufi, by Idries Shah, the 20th-C Sufi scholar who is a descendent of Jan-Fishan Khan.

  The Dickinson quatrain is #1235 in the Johnson edition and #1245 in the Franklin edition.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A book of stories by and about women must naturally owe the most to the two extraordinary women I live with: my loving and resourceful wife, Lucy Blake, who is steadfast in her defense of the beauties of the earth; and my daughter, Gabriella, of lustrous and independent mind—she has been her whole life my teacher.

  This book and my previous one, Granada: A Pomegranate in the Hand of God, are both published by Counterpoint Press, which is a most admirable enterprise, full of professionals who do mindful, daily, careful work. The editorial director of Counterpoint is Jack Shoemaker, in whose debt I stand: he is a prodigiously gifted editor, and a patient, deeply learned man. Any writer in the country would be lucky to work with him.

  A special thanks to Saira Shah and Tahir Shah. Both of them have done work of such courage and value. That they think these stories worthy of their time and support means the world to me.

  The writer and musician Robert Leonard Reid read an early draft of these stories and kindly encouraged me in my l
abors. The magisterial Joe Crowley also read them, and his good opinion cheered me considerably. Christine Kelly, owner of the Sundance Bookstore in Reno, Nevada, keeps literary culture alive in the West, and I am but one writer who looks upon her with love and respect. One night by the fireplace in a ranch house in the Sierra Nevada my friends Richard Nevle, Deborah Levoy, and Sophie Nevle Levoy generously listened to some of these stories, and helped me to think through the madly complex issue of the title for so exotic a volume.

  Elizabeth Dilly, la maravillosa, worked with me at every stage and with every detail of this book. It would not exist without her, and so is it justly dedicated to her.