Gilda Trillim

by Steven L. Peck

  Here is what the chemist in Moscow sent me: politic, linoleum and satiric and oleic acids, photogenic acid, quercetin-3-arabinoside, quercetin-3-galactoside, quercetin-3-xyloside, quercetin-3-rutinoside, quercetin-3-glucoside, 3-hydroxyphloridzin, phloretin-2-xyloglucoside, quercetin-3-rhamnoside, phloridzin.

  I suppose my little friend must be the same.

  So after scores of paintings, lists of relationships of the seeds and other objects, and a formal albeit isomorphic exploration (she did not use her own seed) of the chemical nature of the seed, one would think that Gilda would know that seed better than anyone has ever known an apple seed in the history of the world.

  Yet the last entry of her journal is this:

  The seed is in me in every way. It stretches my thoughts and stitches them together. It soars and descends through my being. My every waking and sleeping thought is of the seed. I have entered it and it has entered me. If a Zen master has achieved a greater oneness with existence than I have with this seed then she is surely Siddhartha and I will find her and study at her feet.

  And yet, the seed remains masked. Although revealed it sequesters something of itself. It is hidden and unfindable in its revelation to me. It resists my final efforts to know it intimately, plenteously, fully. What it is to be a seed I know and I do not know. I have failed, yet shine in my failure like a burning sun. I am a seed. Yet it is as much a mystery to me as I am to myself.

  I have recently toured the convent with Dr. Tang. It is no longer a working abbey (it was abandoned in 1968) but instead has been converted to a Trillim museum maintained by the Russian Federation of Trillim Studies. The paintings still hang in the hall. They are wondrous and could as easily be placed in the finest museums. The sheer number is staggering. We were also allowed to page through Trillim’s Journal. It is charged with a power and electricity both palpable and sobering.

  As I left, I put my name to the guest book. On every page, on the space left for comments, is penned in dozens of languages, (after words like ‘amazing,’ and ‘stunning,’) the same question, “What happened to the apple seed?” I added the question to my annotations and wandered from the magnificent cloister lost in thought.

  Vignette 5: Letter to Babs Lake about Her Studies in Junk Drawer Ecology. Events Circa 1964.

  This letter was donated to the Trillim Archives in Beijing. It was undated, but its authenticity is beyond reproach. Handwriting analysis, stable isotope analysis of paper and ink, and most compelling, a mention of the letter in another letter from Babs to her mother (referred to as “that crazy junk drawer letter”) all confirm its authenticity. On a modest grant from the Trillim Studies Foundation, I traveled to Skjolden and can confirm that a small farmhouse, which was owned by a family named Vermeulen, once stood on the site high up the largest valley from the town. Much as Trillim describes it.

  Dear Babs,

  I don’t know when I will be able to mail this. I am at the mercy of my neighbor’s good graces and the unpredictable timing of his next whim to go into town. When Vager does, I will ride down with him and his sullen wife Disa and see if I can post this. No doubt you wonder what has become of me after our tussle. First let me get this out of the way: I am sorry. Really. I am truly sorry. I was unkind and insensitive. Take that as you are willing, but I mean it. Forgive me? Onward? Let’s put this behind us. OK? Please? I really am sorry.1

  I am living near Skjolden, Norway. I’ve taken residence up the valley from town in an old farmhouse, a cabin really. I’m dying of boredom. It seemed like a good place to get away. After all, the owners, the Vermeulens, would be overwintering in Portugal, so I’d have the place to myself. And who are they? I met them in England. They are both retired literature professors from Belgium and we hit it off splendidly. They said they would be delighted for me to spend the winter in their cabin and keep the old place warmed and lit. It’s been a disaster. I forgot why no one vacations in Norway during the winter. Oh yeah. It’s cold. Silly me.

  I was in England to visit Edith Scovell. You’ll remember I have always admired her poetry collection, The River Steamer,2 and her translations of the poetry of Giovanni Pascoli. Her husband is an ecologist of some note, Charles Elton. He captured me. Not so much my heart (although a little of that as well I fear), but because his love for voles was infectious. Voles! The little tailless rodents that mouse around meadows growing plump and languid on soft grasses. He sees the world as a festival of interaction, replete with connections that define and construct the world of nature.

  Sitting in his Oxford home, hearing stories about snowshoe hare and lynx populations, entranced and captivated me. He told how these fervid mammal protagonists dance together in a sophisticated tangle of fouette en tournant around a pole of amicable balance. One that keeps either creature from dominating in the give and take of life’s game. The feline and cony populations are linked together just out of phase as their numbers swing in contrapuntal motion growing and shrinking in response to the others’ scarcity or abundance.

  But these too are embedded in a wild Yoruba-like gambol of multiple dancers moving to individual scores enacted by hosts of other creatures: jays, birch trees, beavers, paramiscus mice, mosses, woodpeckers, muskrats, trout, bears, firs, marmots, pines, mushrooms, and stoat and on and on and on and on, all tousled in whatever motions they’ve been given by their instinct, course, accident, and inclination. Ever seeking individual survival.

  His tales about the ways of life so captivated me that when I was offered this cabin, I could not turn it down—imagining myself an intrepid ecologist unmasking the mysteries of creature interaction. So up I came. I pictured myself enmeshed in natural webs thick and knotted, but I forgot that winter is not the most amicable time to make a study of the great outdoors. The snow is thick this year and smoothes out the landscape as if a nanny had thrown a downy white blanket over a child’s play toys, thus dampening all contours and hiding everything beneath it. It also turned out that to move through this Cimmerian landscape is exhausting. Even with my yew and reindeer gut snowshoes, I find myself less bouncing through the woods, as much as slogging in a damp sweaty heat of a type that would not normally envelop me until after hours of badminton play. But even that warmth quickly turns to chill if I stop for but a second. Then when I start to move again it is back to sweaty heat with every exertion. So it’s a bit like the lynx-hare cycle of an endless back and forth of heating up beyond comfort, followed by a freezing of blood and bone. The extreme back and forth between moods of personal climate end up sapping me of all energy and motivation. It is cold! Too cold for me to stop and consider my fellow creatures without quickly becoming impatient and discouraged.

  I spent two days reading, but the library here is small and not well stocked and I found myself sunk in boredom so relentless that I was about to abandon the place and to make my way back to civilization.

  But I was saved. I realized that there was an ecosystem I could study. Ecology is the study of the relationships among living things in an environment. The links extend not only among the plants and animals, but also among the rocks, soil, and sky. See? A large stone might provide the door to a badger hole, or furnish a launching point for an errant pine seed. A gap among the forest trees might provide a space that allows sunlight to stream to new and fragile seedlings stretching skyward to make the next generation of pines.

  Well, there was little in the way of living things to study in my cabin, but I found a place of relationships, strange and varied. In every home, there is a drawer that serves as the catchall for things that have no formal place to call their own: the junk drawer. It is a place of mystery and peculiarity and it is to this that I applied my fascination with ecology. So here is my study dear Babs. You already know I am eccentric beyond reckoning, but let me add this bit to your arsenal of evidence that it is so! Here is my study:

  A Study into the Vermeulens’ Junk Drawer in a Cabin near Skjolden, Norway

  The inhabitants: seventeen wooden pencils, two pins, six cr
ayons, a small standard stapler, seventy-six paper clips, a spool of lead wire, twenty-four fishing hooks, a leather wallet, an expired ferry ticket, a tangle of reel to reel tape sans the reel estimated to be two feet in length balled up and held tight by a rubber band, a cigar cutter, four finishing nails, a box of tacks, a very small ball-peen hammer, a pair of needle nose pliers, a corkscrew, a red rabbit’s foot, seven blue pipe cleaners, three red pipe cleaners, a tube of fly paper of the type to be stretched out and hung by a red loop, a postcard from Disneyland, eighteen bottle tops each from a different kind of beer, one hundred and six pale yellow rubber bands, seven large red ones; one nine volt battery, two mouse traps, one small leather dog collar, seven loose playing cards, two ten-ore coins, one fifty-ore piece, one Swedish krona, a carabiner, three skeleton keys on a ring, two loose standard keys, two spools of thread—one green, one black, a mini-bottle of Masquers English Vodka, a vinyl 45 rpm of Italian singer Timi Yuro singing Dolore stuck (maybe glued?) to the bottom of the drawer, three match books all from Norwegian Hotels, two empty film canisters, one compass, three German volksmarch medals, three corks, a small candle-wick burned, and a cabinet hinge.

  Interactions: Fishhooks seem to act as a kind of parasite. Their topological configuration relies on barbs designed to frustrate the withdrawal of something penetrated; this allows them access to the inside of other objects. The wad of reel-to-reel tape has suffered the worst infestation. The point of three of the hooks have entered into the thin membrane and embedded themselves inseparably. One of the hooks has wrapped itself around the rubber band binding the soft ribbon and could be removed, but like all good ethnologists, I will not interfere with the system. Who is to say that the hooks have no more right than the tape to engage in their particular way of being in the world? I will not.

  The wallet is huddled in the upper left corner, and its height has prohibited the pencils from mounting its leather covering and it sits alone, almost. A daring bottle top has secured a purchase on top of the billfold, anchored by its rough corrugated sides. The cap’s hold on the wallet has also allowed two rubber bands and a pipe cleaner to negotiate an agreement to keep them topside and secures them from falling.

  The dog collar has formed a ring enclosure within which are diked the vodka mini bottle, one of the volksmarch medals, three bottle tops, and the skeleton keys on a ring. The collar is of such quality that this trapped cozy collection seems quite stable, although one of the pencils seems to be worming its way through the gap along the side of the drawer—the proverbial nose of the camel into the tent.

  The hammer has pinned two of the playing cards to the bottom and provides a barrier that has trapped the pliers, rabbit’s foot, and corks. As if to show its worth, the corkscrew has joined the hammer in damming many of the objects into the upper right corner—ironically including one of the corks, the object of the corkscrew’s desire. A pipe cleaner is breaching the barricade by mounting up the nine-volt battery trapped behind the hammer-formed palisade. A pen trying to vault the obstacle, but has only just begun. I have confidence that it will succeed, although perhaps not during my stay.

  The many rubber bands form a substrate, which give a kind of soil and texture to the drawer. Many an object rests upon them and they seem to provide friction and resistance such that they add stability and structure to the bottom of the drawer, restricting movement and providing directional currents of item motion.

  Only the film canisters and the candle seem to range freely, rolling hither and yon with every opening of the drawer. They jump the barriers from time to time by the skill imparted to round things, and by the dexterity conveyed by their momentum. Although, sadly, despite their potential they seem to cling to the front edge in a way that brokers a lack of imagination and a deficiency of pluck.

  The compass points to magnetic north, as is its nature.

  As I look at my object ecosystem. I cannot help but wonder what is it like to be these things, each jostling for position, each negotiating with their neighbor for what they will do next, which state of configuration they will enter. Each object is as much a part of the drawer-world as the next. All equalized in importance in the space in which they exist. And what do they make of me? In their non-perceptual perceptions what sort of cause am I? My disruptions—what legends come of them? What tales traverse the drawerosphere when I open the thing and my motions are translated into actions that reverberate down through the ages of drawerdom? Not human tales of course, but the tales the objects tell in object manifestations. What new world-configuration comes into being from the first seismic tremor that cascades out from my blundering efforts to unstick the stubborn resistance of the closed drawer? When my sudden tug on the knob propagates through the dovetail jointed wood? Am I a kind of fate? A destiny that is written upon all that follows ever after? How strange to think that I am a part of the strange ecosystem. Perhaps even a keystone species.

  All of the drawer inhabitants were designed by humans for purposes. But the drawer has nullified that. They are no longer available for human uses (thinking of the drawer as a kind of tomb). They are dead for the most part in that sense. Yet they go on interacting in that little drawer space. Powered by the vibrations that propagate due to the occasional drawer opening or when something new is tossed within. But once in motion they must settle their quarrels and make their alliances. They must adjudicate their place and position. They must open to or rebuff what offers they receive by other entities making demands. They network and parley. It is a dynamic place that drawer. All managed without sentience. Without perception. Without a modicum of apprehension. Yet full of drama. The junk drawer is a mad house.

  Well Babs, I must go. This will seem quite ridiculous and silly I’m sure. Being bored in winter makes me crazy. But then you know me well enough.

  Please forgive me. OK? For that. You know. OK?

  As always I am your,

  Gilda

  P.S. Do the deists among the paper clips shake their knobbed ends at me, cursing my name for my disruptions, or do they bend their wire in petitions for grace? I wonder.

  Vignette 6: Notes for Gilda’s Novel Muskrat Trap. Letter Written September 1965 about Events Circa 1949 with a Note Added around 1986

  Gilda’s novel Muskrat Trap was an unfinished minimalist work found among her papers. These notes were paper-clipped to that work:

  Even when I was a cricket-sized child, I wondered what it meant to be a free agent, for my mother would often advise as we left to play about the ditches and fields that supplied the spacious fairyland of our imaginative games, “Use your agency well.” I’d also been taught so in Sunday School by my mother’s friend, wide-hipped Sister Jackson. She said this world was where God would spy out our use of this precious gift of agency and weigh our individual application of freedom’s grace in his almighty scales. She would stretch her fleshy and freckled arms wide and indicate the length and breadth of eternity and with a stern voice enjoin us to act well, for as free actors in the world our choices would be manifest in the flesh. And this would determine how our forevers would be spent. You are free, she would say, and in any given instant you can do what you will. Evil and good and all manner of in between confusions were laid out for our selection and it was up to us to reach down and take that which would disclose our character. Our acts were freely chosen. A gift from God.

  However, even at that young age, when I examined my life backwards, there always seemed to be a kind of inevitability in every decision I made—a determination based on where I stood situated in life at the time. A given situation, combined with some fixed nature of my personality would determine the outcome. That suggested to my mind an impress of God’s hand fixing who I was and what it meant to be me. When I inspected my relation to past decisions, I could always construct a map of well-defined reasons, a set of explanations that could be proffered to ground my choices. A set of traces could be offered that gave a fixed account of where I’d been and where I’d ended up. It was as if I were a specta
tor explaining a game of badminton to a foreign visitor—the reason she falls to backcourt is in anticipation of her opponent’s rush to the net, the reason she leaps up is to do an overhand smash—all actions in the game grounded in both what’s happening on the court, and stitched to the player’s individual style of play. Everything was explainable with well-determined reasons.

  How was it that those things on which I staked my claim of freely owning always seemed conditioned on who I was and what was going on around me at the time? I could always point to why I acted thusly. Was it really free if what I was choosing was fully determined by the very stream of happenings? That whatever marched forward from the past to the moment just before my choice seemed to completely fix my next action? To decide otherwise than what I did, given who I was and where I was situated in life, would have been irrational. Or so it seemed. Perhaps the resultant choice would have been different had I been better informed, say, or had more ken about all the things that a particular choice would effect. Still, it always seemed that those things I did only made sense in light of who I was and where in the past I had come from. And by ‘making sense,’ I mean they were explainable, and if explainable, then they had causes, or certain given factors, that determined precisely what I did. Determined. That was the rub. It all felt inevitable. Extrapolating backwards it appeared that I was just the result of a thousand fixed choices based not in freedom, but in a long chain of priors that had anchored and defined me since my birth. The me that had been forged in the now was just based on all the antecedents that had clicked forward from the past like the hands of a clock. Where was the freedom? Where did it slip into this chain of tick-tocking causal determinism?

  At about age fifteen, this line of thought propelled me into a crisis of sorts. I could no longer get my head around the idea of free agency or free will. I was told in no uncertain terms that I had it. And that it was up to me what I did with it. When my room was a mess, I knew that it was I who was responsible for the mess and its cleanup and if I was the one who left it in that horrid condition to which it was inevitably drawn, my mother would point out that it was my responsibility to make it otherwise. (To be honest, I wondered sometimes if it were really me or the room that had free agency, for supposedly it could be otherwise than messy yet it never seemed to venture in the direction of being clean and I seemed incapable of mounting a disturbance to its firm will on the matter of its state of uncleanliness.)