Was she mad? A fraud or charlatan manipulating even those who loved her best to achieve some macabre end to satisfy an over-imaginative ego? Whose martyrdom sealed the fame and longevity of her work? Perhaps all of these.
My own take is that she did become a redeemer of sorts. Not for humans, but for the rats. For after all this, one of the few things I can state with confidence is this: she loved them. This is rarely commented on by those who study her life. They tend to look at motivations of power or madness or attempts to manipulate others to achieve unstated and dimly guessed goals that she was supposed to have harbored. However, the one truth I can’t seem to let go of is that she loved those rats.
She saw in them something important and wondrous that brooked nothing but attention and devotion. That they saved her (and I do frankly state that I believe her account as given), and she them. She loved them and cared for them. She followed them like a mother does her children no matter what their distance both in time and place. She delighted that they held onto what she taught them in song and apparently even passed it on to their descendants. Moreover, it is clear that she believed that the rats were becoming something. That this song of theirs that emerged newborn into the world was the manifestation of a new chapter in Earth’s history—that it would continue to grow and spread among these strange creatures into something novel and important. I sense Gilda believed her South American vision. Or at least aspects of it. At least that there were things in the universe—she called them shepherds and shepherdesses—that loved complexly. That were devoted to watching and delighting in what emerged. Somehow, that inspired her to do the same—to be a shepherdess of the rats. She died for that emergence, as any great redeemer will. Or so I’ve come to believe.
This is what was written on the paper given me by Lake.
How strange to find myself here. Mother’s gone and I always told myself that I came to these meetings for her. She’s been gone now nearly two months and yet I still attend. Around me the deacons with tussled hair and wrinkled white shirts have passed the bread and the water, blessed with ritual exactness (repeated twice today at the insistence of the Bishop).
The Sacrament. The Lord’s Supper. What is this? I take the small cup between my thumb and forefinger. I look at the clear water, cool in a white cardstock cup. My gaze descends all the way to the bottom of the cup. I stare. Peering in, it’s as if I’m looking into the benthos of a small pale white pond. The individual fibers that make up the paper of the cup are magnified and by attending even more closely, enlarge to fill my field of vision. The young man standing beside the row shifts impatiently, hinting that I should drink it up and return the tray to him, but I don’t want to drink it. I want to imbibe it with my eyes. With my heart. With my mind. I keep the cup and hand him the tray. I look back into the water. And I discover I know it! Not the water as H2O, but as symbol. As an offering. I know it through and through. How strange. Unlike the apple seeds, I sense in the cup’s liquid a purity. A revealed totality of essence. I sense it through and through. Not as a noun-ed thing. Neither the fullness of the thing it represents—a remembrance of sacrificial blood. But a symbol whose presence is a given fullness. A grace. White cupped water. A symbol. Nothing seems hidden or withdrawn. It is pure expression. A pointer. And as pointer, pure. To what does it gesture? Events thousands of years ago. Events that have since created networks and networks within networks full and rich, but all somehow condensing in this cup, and through it into me and shooting from me, binding me in complexity and relations running in and through all of time. I’ve spent my life trying to understand one thing in fullness and am I offered it in a paper cup? Isn’t this Logos? The word made flesh and made word again? I look at the water, its surface tremorring in tiny wavelets dancing across, distorting all that lies below it, yet not affecting its givenness. Its grace. I think, wasn’t it a single word that God spoke that brought the universe into existence? An utterance, a sound, like the water in the cup that contains the fullness in symbol from which all things emanate? And in this don’t we see the purity of this word, which appears as is? Apparent, it offers itself as is. I am that I am. And now it all comes home. Finally I see it. The one thing whose appearance is the thing in itself. Essence in this water. Apparent and graspable in its univocal simplicity. Representing the word made flesh, a word spoken in the beginning from which all things emerge, and returning here in this cup. In my hand.
I looked and looked at an apple seed. I never found it. I looked at all the things connected to it and never located it. Yet here in my hand in clear water is a symbol that I know and from which all things are connected. Nets upon nets tangle and weave around me. The word. The Om. Maybe a remnant of the one thing that fractured through an event of stochastic eruption. A pointer to everything else.
And there it is. I laugh. A deacon looks at me reprovingly. I fall to silence but the smile does not leave my mouth. How strange that these connections established by a few dirty itinerant men and women at the dinner of a dying and doomed and betrayed man have bubbled forward from a tiny tick of land held as vassal by the Roman Empire. From there the threads wind through the Middle Ages, through renaissances and holocausts thick and many, to a small Mormon congregation in Moab, Utah. From that launch point a ritual meal is re-enacted and remembered and has become the word of a god entering the world. A shepherd god. Gods who cry and laugh and sing and dance. Male and female gods. Gods of a wild and strange biology evolved from chaos, then finding and helping what emergences and intelligences that appear. Gods willing to die. Are such possible then?
Who can say?
But this I can say. I came from somewhere. The reasons given that the bread passed my lips came from somewhere else, but they join and combine in me into a richer reality than either of us alone. Is this what a shepherd does? See the nascent potentials and enlivens and encourages them and allows them to flower into what they will? Fly above the void and the face of the deep and see in the chaos embryonic stirrings that might in complexity emerge into newness?
Why? That I know. I know it well. It is for love. What else could engender such sacrifices to achieve the redemptive power necessary to midwife these possibilities, these potentials, these capacities, into existence?
My rats. My beloved rats. I cannot think of them without my heart swelling to nearly the point of exploding asunder like a nuclear bomb at the bigness of the grace they offered me and in turn received from me in their song. Grace. Love. Those things I found in them. What future inheres in that event we shared? How might a shepherdess nurture that moment, like this Son of God, whose flesh I weekly partake, and in whose symbols I find instantiated essences pure? Did he in his act of redemption set in motion the reverberations we feel to this day? If humans pass away like all species do eventually, will the song of my rats continue? Can this be repeated if someone loves them enough to die for them?
The note ends here.
My Thesis
The stars are out bright against a black moonless sky. A pack of coyotes yaps not far away. Stanislaw does not even raise his head to their calls. If they were silently moving among the sheep he would know and be as alert as a prizefighter. Their chatter indicates they are about other things.
I stretch and walk down the two-track road which runs from where the trailer is parked. Little mounds of white sheep appear in the distance as the meadow rises to the line of trees maybe a half-mile away. I did not hear him wake up, but Stanislaw has joined me. He walks observant and silent, content to plod behind in case he is needed.
The air is calm, cool. I breathe it in.
Sitting under this sky, I think about Gilda. About whether she was mad. After reading the above, my advisors asked that I end this with a conclusion as to that question. But what can I say? I do not know what madness is or would look like when everything Gilda did points to a keen and clever mind embracing a universe that makes little sense.
So conclusions? I am convinced like many that Gilda was dying of some ailment
. Cancer perhaps—Babs, the only one who knows, refuses to say. I believe she went to Thailand ostensibly for a cure (that is the pretense she told Babs, I believe). But she went there to see the rats she had read about in the travel magazine. That is all I can conclude. Did she want to die at their hand? How could she know they would remember the rituals enacted at Fatty Lumpkin’s death? I doubt she did. Things transpired as they will. An emergence.
I am convinced that the rats were descendants of her choir. The night after Gilda’s death the rats were never seen again. Had they been, I’m sure they would have been killed as a danger to tourists, but they evaporated into the forest and no sign of their existence was ever found.
Was she mad then? If she was, then we all are. She pulled a world into existence and in that world she created a new thing. Something extraordinary that had never before existed.
I like to imagine the rats singing on. Remembering in their ratty way Gilda Trillim. Although I doubt that they will remember that name, perhaps she will exist as a tone-poem remembered and sung for millions of murid generations and in so doing, create a new niche wherein novelty can continue to evolve stippled with fresh complexities that brighten and make new this particular plane structured so that new creations can unfold.
Notes & References
Introduction
1. Based on a paper delivered to the Association of Mormon Letters, March 2019.
2. With the advent of modern computer technology there has been a revival of the French School with its attempt to take the power set of the words in the novel with the constraint that each subset includes at least one of the types of words (objects, attribute, etc.). While there have been some interesting readings using these techniques, (see e.g., Guimond, G. G. and Y. Meunier. “Badiou, Set Theory, and Trillim: The Ecstasy of the Void. Author & Text 34 [1998]: 234–41) my own feeling is that these have largely failed.
3. See Levant, S. and M. Gregson. “Emergence of Meaning and the Unnecessary Inclusion of Conjunctions: Linkages, Networks, and Ecological Relationships in Trillim.” Feminist Studies 6 (1999): 24–56.
Vignette 1
1. I’d like to thank the staff at the Church History Library for helping me with access to Arnfinnur Skáldskapur’s journal and family letters. Also thanks to the (still in existence) Redbearded Horseshoers, for access to the minutes of early meetings.
2. The dresses he changed can still be seen in the Astral Room at the Redbearded Horseshoers’ Lodge in Salt Lake City.
3. Jorge Luis Borges, discussion published in the Columbia Forum and later quoted in Worldwide Laws of Life: 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles by John M. Templeton (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 1998. 141).
Vignette 2
1. Smithy, J. G., H. Z. Chang, and R. Gallacci. “Trillim, the 1957 Uber Cup, and the Hidden Influence of Merleau-Ponty.” The Gilda Trillim Quarterly 7 (2012): 126–38.
Vignette 3
1. I used this as the reference although it is unknown to me which one Trillim actually used, but this is the same translation: Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way—Remembrance Of Things Past. Vol. 1. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff. New York: Henry Holt And Company, 1922. Accessed November 11, 2012 (The Project Gutenberg): http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7178/7178-h/7178-h.htm.
2. Leopold, Aldo. “Thinking Like a Mountain.” In A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1970.
Vignette 5
1. It is unknown what this apparent fight or falling out is about.
2. Scovell, E. J. River Steamer. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 1956.
Vignette 6
1. Steig, W. Abel’s Island. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 1976.
Vignette 7
1. Hankski, F. “Dating Trillim’s Note on Melancholia.” The Gilda Trillim Quarterly 2 (2007): 123–25
Vignette 8
1. Obviously this must be the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Her use of the word Nazi may reflect some familiarity of his work as interpreted by the French Existentialists of this time period (indicating she was more familiar with what she was reading than Babs seemed to be aware).
Vignette 9
1. Recipe repeated from Millar, J. “Black Cake: (A Recipe from Emily Dickinson, for Emily Dickinson).” Collapse 7 (July 2011): 411. Not Trillim’s original unknown source.
Vignette 10
1. Trillim, Gilda. “Adventures of Mind, Tragedy of Body.” Look Magazine (July 1967): 11.
2. Blinova, P. “Drugs and Madness: Trillim and the Argument for a Flashback.” International Journal of Historical Psychology and Behavioral Science 6 (2001): 109–17.
Vignette 11
1. De Azevedo, L. and C. L. Pearson. My Turn On Earth: A Family Musical Play. Embryo Records. 1977.
2. A sonnet.
3. A sonnet.
4. Satan starts with a series of couplets.
5. A villanelle
6. A sestina.
7. An Italian sonnet.
8. A set of limericks.
9. An Elizabethan sonnet.
10. A pantoun
Vignette 12
1. The Paris Review 101, (Winter 1986). “Gilda Trillim Interview.” The Art of Fiction. No. 94b.
2. These words come from Gilda Trillim’s unpublished papers. They are located in the Archive, and the story of how I found them is well worth telling, but not here.
3. Gilda Trillim’s unpublished papers.
4. Some scholars, in particular Jan Sillitoe of Princeton University and Ping Hsu of the University of Beijing have formally discounted Gilda’s story of rats feeding her, and have argued at several academic conferences that this is exactly what she was doing, and her stories started as avoidance of what she had had to do to survive and became so embedded in her consciousness that she came to believe the story. However they are a minority. Especially in light of the eye witness account of the Soviet delegation’s report on Gilda’s relationship with the rats contained in the files at the Russian Academy of Science.
5. Gilda Trillim’s unpublished papers.
6. Larson, S. “The King Follett Discourse: A Newly Amalgamated Text.” BYU Studies 18 (1978): 2.
Vignette 13
1. There are those who wonder if there is a real object behind the phenomenological experience of the possible object. Berkley held that all was the mind of God generating all sensual experience and that all was just a perception of an object He wanted us to experience. There is no refuting that possibility that ‘thought’ is all that is real. I may be the only real mind in the word. I cannot refute that, but that is not the way to bet. Yes, it’s nothing but a wager that objects exist, but one I am willing to make and accept without further proof—Kit.
2. Note: I don’t know Trillim’s actual reference but this is contained in: Sweet, D. Heraclitus: Translation and Analysis. New York: University Press of America, 1995. 123.
3. Appears to be an original translation. Compare to Porete, M. The Mirror of Simple Souls/Marguerite Porete. Trans. and Intro. Ellen L. Babinsky. Pref. Robert E. Lerner. The Classics of Western Spirituality. Yahweh, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993. 79.
4. Appears to be an original translation. (Compare to Hadewijch.) Hadewijch: The Complete Works. Trans. and Intro. Mother Columba Hart, O.S.B. Pref. Paul Mommaers. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980. 195.
Vignette 14
1. Petrov. S. “Gilda Trillim and Monty Smith: Minimalist Connections.” Western Culture 13 (1998): 320–33.
Vignette 17
1. Ovid. Not sure of Gilda’s reference. I reference Ovid. The Art of Love and Other Poems. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. 66.
Vignette 18
1. SLP. “What the Ant Knew.” Silver Blade 15 (16 Sep. 2012).
Vignette 19
1. Iguchi, A. and K. Khornezh. E. “Elves in the La Sals: More Evidence of Undiagnosed Schizophrenia in Gilda Trillim.” Literature and Mental Illness 29 (1999): 343–62.
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br /> 2. J. Faulconer. “Divine Embodiment and Transcendence: Propaedeutic Thoughts and Questions.” Element 1, (spring 2001).
3. This person (or strange; creature, as many believe it to be) is not unknown among those who have spent significant time in the La Sal Mountains. The Hispanic herders who worked for my father call her la pequeña elfa. Some of the cowboys call her ‘Littlefoot.’ And now I must confess. I have seen her too. I’ll explain momentarily. After reading Gilda’s account, I started asking around to see if anyone else had seen the woman Trillim describes. Most were loath to admit they had encountered this individual and among those who did, most of the accounts were reports of fleeting glimpses, usually in the late afternoon.
I wanted to put some rigor into my explorations because I thought if I could interview this strange person, it would add much to the Trillim story, especially if she could corroborate the account of their meeting. While many think she is some sort of supernatural entity, I, of course, do not.
I began to formally chart where these reported encounters had taken place, thinking I might be able to triangulate back to the place where she lived (I was convinced that she lived up here in the mountains). She has been seen over much of the La Sals but only in the densest aspen forests, typically in roadless areas. I was able to locate eight accounts of encounters made by those who snatched a clear enough glimpse to claim to have gotten a good look at her. I also obtained accounts of sixteen fleeting glimpses that had enough detail to warrant further consideration.
Gilda’s encounter is typical. Sometimes the strange woman is described as naked. Sometimes as wearing clothes similar to what she was wearing when Gilda saw her. Part of the problem is that the woman has become the fare of starlit campfire stories. A number of people have heard the story of the fey woman and repeat them corrupting the genuine narratives. When this occurs, the ‘I thought I saw her’ accounts start to outnumber actual detailed reports. I believe this is what happened with Bigfoot in the northwest. This creates a difficulty because people who have heard the legend of an elf creature and have been primed to see an elf, start to let their memories of a glimpse of an unexplained movement in late afternoon light augment their experience with memories of the stories they have heard. They add details and amendments resembling popular accounts to the original experience. These often enough start looking like archetypal fairies from fairytales complete with wings, or pixie skirts, or other Tinkerbelle accoutrements.
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