Locked out here with the ghosts of those who tied the rope, lit the match, plunged the shovel, clamped shut their mouths, squeezed tight their eyes.
The mara ride you so fast you could catch your own reflection.
The mara ride until you beg for a horseshoe to hold the flying winds of yourself down.
When the mara’s hooves thunk across the lead, it rings a steely echo.
Glas Gaibhleann
The people were obsessed with milk. The people were obsessed with ways to stop the witches from stealing the milk. So great was their obsession that the Malleus Maleficarum, that handbook for inquisitors, devoted an entire chapter to the subject under the heading “Here followeth how witches injure cattle in various ways.”
The witches, it was said, make a thing called a tilberi. First they steal a rib from a recently buried body, then wind it up in wool stolen from beneath the shoulders of a widow’s sheep. They tuck it between their breasts and for the next three Sundays at Communion they spit sanctified wine on the thing, watching it grow more alive with each spit. When grown enough, it sucks the inside of a thigh. And when it is finally weaned, it can be sent to steal milk. Each night it returns to call at the window, “Full belly, Mommy,” and vomit the stolen milk into a butter churn.
The witches turn into rabbits and suckle the cow’s teat, they turn into butterflies and their fluttering sours the cream. They turn into owls or flies or dogs or cats for the sake of creeping on that milk. They call it through spells into their own pails. They ask and then torment anyone who will not give a glass.
They make a hair rope by knotting severed cows’ tails and then tugging that rope while repeating the charm:
Cow’s milk and mare’s milk
and every beast that bares milk
between St. Johnstone’s and Dundee
Come ‘a to me, come ‘a to me.
Before there was “nature” as a concept separate from “the world”; before there were sugar plantations and coffee plantations and tobacco fields stretched out to the horizon; before there were cotton gins working their gears as fast as a pair of scarred and aching hands could feed them, there was the story of Glas Gaibhleann and the beginning of milk.
The history of milk is a history of unexpected gifts and unexpected consequences. Though relatively common among those of European descent, lactase persistence is a genetic abnormality that allows adult bodies to process lactose. Just a one-standard-deviation increase in the emergence of this genetic variation is associated with a 40 percent rise in population density as milk’s fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals added balance to precolonial diets, creating economic and population booms. Followed only later by the density corrections of famine, war, and plague.
Before there were witches or demons or God the Father in His Heavens, before telescopes or microscopes or manuscripts were carried across those mountains that divided the monasteries of Europe from the libraries of the Middle East, before the priests began to tremble at the smallest voice in their heads wondering if …, the people told how Glas Gaibhleann, the divine cow, gave a rich cream and her udders never ran dry. She could walk the island of the world in a single day. The rocky Burren was made by her hooves and she fed all whom she met. No one ever starved when she was around.
So of course the people tried to enslave her and take her abundance for themselves. When she left for the stars, only that creamy sheen of the Milky Way was left behind.
The history of witches is a history of need. You can see this by how people are always accusing witches of stealing the milk. The history of witches is also the history of a social contract. You can see this by how people sometimes went to the witches for medicine to keep themselves alive and sometimes pointed an accusing finger to keep themselves alive. When you are afraid, it can be difficult not to hate the people you need. Sometimes I think I am the one calling it all into my pail. Sometimes I think I am the mob. Sometimes I think none of it is real except the fear.
And sometimes I’m miles outside the town of my life, watching the butterflies pollinate the fields of flowers the rabbits dash and hunker. Any of these could be a witch carrying a mouthful of buttercream. This whole mountain might be nothing but small and large sips of milk that have been stolen or borrowed or brought back home to share. Surely this too could be a place where that great cow once put down a hoof.
Hildegard von Bingen
Despite the obvious similarities and the fact she was summoned to an inquisition, Hildegard von Bingen was not a witch, she was a canonized saint. Her epiphanic hallucinations are gathered into one text, Scivias, her remedies for ailments (collected from Persian translations in her convent library and folklore from the fields beyond the cloister garden walls) are kept separate in Physica. As if they have nothing to do with each other.
The Physica reads like one of the more beautiful spell books I’ve seen.
“Whoever is plagued by wrong dreams should have betony leaves close by when going to sleep.”
“If anyone have a headache, and his head is buzzing as if he were deaf, let him eat often of cloves, and they will ameliorate the buzzing in his head.”
“If any have a weak and sad heart, let him cook mullein with meat or fish … and it will strengthen his heart and make it merry.”
Like some member of the Heresy of the Free Spirit, a movement she inspired that arose a century later and provoked a great deal of burning, I’ve been having erotic fantasies about the divine. Specifically, the emerald Hildegard kept beside her bed as a symbol or a touchstone or a threshold to the green soul of this world. Also, it was, she said, an aid and remedy to the seizures that accompanied her visions.
Last night, for example, I was walking in the little forest in the center of our city and having the feeling of ecstasy and yearning I get in equal measures any time I go to the woods. I feel opened up and rushing, as if there were a wound like a river in my chest and I think I just need to channel it somewhere so it won’t feel so much like I am the wound splintering that river.
I’m sorry to say this, but a husband you’ve known for practically your whole life who is off driving a bus somewhere to make money for the car payment, who needs an Excedrin every morning and didn’t particularly care for the grilled fish you made last night either but sure he’ll pick up some shampoo on the way home, he’s just not really working as a destination for this particular stream of great and terrible.
I wonder on these walks if this means I don’t love him at all or enough or where I could ever find a place to take this cup of wracking feeling that makes it hard to eat, and pour it out.
What I mean is that I’ve been wondering if this feeling of the forest beating my heart horny is a way of being called back to the Church. There is a green part of the Church, after all, with the liturgical seasons and a different plant under the bare feet of each saint in the book and all those candles of women singing “Ave Maria.”
“If a man have any rotten flesh in him, then boil this herb [vervain] in water, lay a linen cloth on his wounds, and when the water has been pressed out lay on the vervain too. Do this until all the rottenness is gone.”
“If a man is forgetful and would be cured of it, let him crush out the juice of the stinging nettle, and add some olive oil, and when he goes to bed, let him anoint his chest and temples with it and do this often, and his forgetfulness will be alleviated.”
“Lavender wine will provide a person with pure knowledge and a clear understanding.”
I’ve been walking past the white stones of Sacred Heart each morning on the way home. I’ve been telling myself it’s a form of field research. So far I have not forgotten how the place remains mortared up with black-frocked priests and the chinks all stuffed with papal bulls.
I try not to think too much about the theology classes I was required to take year after year and how the nuns went on about agape, or divine love, as superior to the erotic. That was the line they used to get all the cool seniors to take pledges of second
ary virginity and how they got the rest of us to feel smug about everything we didn’t know. I don’t appreciate having been so manipulated and don’t intend to succumb to so much rhetoric twice.
After spending a great many years pretending to feel the things everybody else claims to be feeling in the measure they claim to feel them, now I feel like thinking about how Hildegard holds that emerald in her mouth. It is as green as the moisture of the body, she says, as the rain that falls down into the earth and smooth as glass when I run my mouth along the worn edges of the rough cut.
She explained her visions as an arrival of light, rooted in the green of the soul, which glows as the leaves glow after a rain when the sun is bright and every droplet becomes a convex mirror. “Then the greenness of the earth and the grasses thrives with the greatest vigor,” she says. “For the air is still cold and the sun is already warm. The plants suck the green life force as strongly as a lamb sucks its milk.”
I started reading about witches because I thought I’d find people talking about how they felt this green world offering to take over their bodies if only they could figure out how to let it. But what I found was just the usual politics and patriarchal bullshit. Much like how I started a garden, but your own garden is never as beautiful as someone else’s patch of weeds, much as your own food is never as delicious as a meal cooked by someone else, and the sex is never quite what you thought it would be when you are the one choreographing it.
Of course it’s an old theme to suggest that the intellect and the erotic are born of the same seed. After all, the thinking goes, the desire to know is, first and foremost, a desire to sense. If you ask Foucault, he’ll say Aristotle thought it first, though it is Foucault’s explanation that rings like a vision—“the desire to know was inscribed in nature, phusei, it is now presented as the pleasure of the sensation taken in itself, i.e. apart from any utility.” It gets hotter. “There are as many distinct pleasures as there are activities of sensation.” And, climactically, “Desire is knowledge deferred, but made visible in the impatience of the suspense in which it is held.”
Like anybody, I live at the intersection of longing and discipline. Like anybody, I am not sure if I have made the right choices.
Hildegard was reluctant to speak of or write her visions. She waited for the bishops to badger her for an accounting. And then she only offered it in Latin, not like those careless heretics proclaiming what they had seen in those vulgar tongues that people pushing their carts along the roads could understand. She reminds me of my friend whose strategy for keeping her sensations real is to hardly ever tell them to anyone else. Like Foucault explaining Socrates, this friend and this saint of mine each believe in “a knowledge which bewitches and whose gaze dazzles on those whom it fixes.” Sometimes she graces me with one of her secrets as a way of showing our friendship is important to her. Once she gave me the secret that she likes to scatter her secrets among friends so no one person knows everything. As in, “Oedipus does not look at the secret but the secret looks at him, it does not take its eyes off him.”
When I think about what others might call a sin, I think of it as research. I think of it as Causae et Curae. I think of how I need to know what it is between us, me and my longing, me and anyone, me and the mystery of this world that surrounds us. I think of it as fennel and that “however fennel is eaten, it makes men merry, and gives them a pleasant warmth, and makes them sweat well, and causes good digestion.”
The Aristotles that Never Were
When I am thinking about leaving my husband, my friend reminds me of that poem we both like where you sit and watch the boats on the horizon that are all the lives you might have lived.
When I am trying to decide what I want out of the realm of what’s possible, I watch a hummingbird pollinate the fireweed as he does every morning of this season and think about how Aristotle said all knowledge is rooted in the senses. How he said philosophy begins with our own desire to feel because we cannot know anything until we know why we feel what we feel and do not what we do not.
Aristotle’s name and writings disappeared for centuries. Arabic librarians were the ones that saved him until the Crusaders came and wanted their literacy back. But translation creates infinite possible meanings in a pool with the ripple of infinite ways to say them. Whales surface and propagate the mysterious science of their deep being out at the horizon where they are almost, or perhaps are, or most certainly are not, more of those pretty white sails.
Pseudo-Aristotelian texts abounded throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Everybody’s favorite handbook for sex and midwifing, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, was just one of the manuscripts inappropriately credited to him, who would probably not have proposed hirsute maidens and dark-skinned infants were the consequences of their parents’ imaginations at the moment of conception.
There was also not-Aristotle’s De proprietatibus elementorum, a work on geology that was considered helpful by the alchemists. And On the Universe was a popular reference for the astrologers that Aristotle did not write. Real Thomas Aquinas read and appreciated Unreal Aristotle’s The Book of Aristotle’s Explanations of Pure Good. If only the Secreta Secretorum, a study on the unseen world, had been written by a philosopher who believed your senses, not your mind, determine what is real, then there might be some hope amidst all of our longing.
In Aristotle’s Problemata, another of these anonymous not-Aristotles asks question after question for hundreds of pages. What is carnal reproduction? he wants to know. And, How are hermaphrodites begotten?
Why is it the change of seasons and the winds intensify or stop diseases and bring them to a crisis and engender them?
Why do they say a change of drinking water is unhealthy, but not a change of air?
Why do those who are asleep perspire more freely?
Why has wine the effect both of stupefying and of driving to frenzy those who drink it?
Why are the drunken more easily moved to tears?
As I read, I sometimes think Pseudo-Aristotle is paying very close attention and sometimes I think that he pays no attention at all. As I read, my friend is watching the boats. Surely one of them is meant for us.
Why are the melancholic particularly inclined for sexual intercourse?
Why are birds and men with thick hair lustful?
Why are riders on horseback less likely to fall?
Why do some unpleasant sounds make us shudder?
Why is it that some animals cough, while others do not?
I wonder what makes a person so good at noticing questions. It is a gift, I think, to know this art of opening up the ends of ideas and making them wonder their theories right off into unwritten silence at the margins of the page.
Why is it that fair men and white horses usually have grey eyes?
Why is it that eunuchs do not become bald?
Why is it that the deaf always speak through their nostrils?
Why are sounds more audible at night?
Why does cold water poured out of a jug make a shriller sound than hot water poured out of the same jug?
I have been admonished about the tedium of going on about wonder for no other reason than to say “Look how wide my eyes are right now,” but sometimes I just want to tell someone something amazing I have learned because knowing it has made me feel happy in a way that being astonished feels happy. I want the life where someone is happy just to be sitting next to me. I want the life where I am astonished by unexpected compliments or a certain way a friend has of finding a reason that is no good reason to touch my wrist.
Why is the sound of weeping shrill, whereas that of laughing is deep?
Why are our voices deeper in winter?
Why does salt make a noise when it is thrown on the fire?
Why does the voice tremble in those who are afraid?
Why are the odors both of burnt perfumes and flowers less pleasant at a short distance?
Are scents smoke or air or vapor?
Pseu
do-Aristotle only answers questions with more questions. Reading his Problemata feels like reading the invention of a hypothesis that might one day come to be called the scientific method.
I want our boat-spackled horizon filled with all of the questions I have no idea how to answer. I don’t like how we’re never going to know the answers, but I like knowing it together. What would Aristotle himself have thought if he knew what was to become of his name? On the truly terrible days, I can only imagine him feeling indifference, as if a fog never lifted and the chair beside him is empty now. As if he never saw his other lives passing by. But that’s just one boat. On others he is frustrated by the obfuscation of his work. Or outraged. Or cracking up at what time can do with what we thought we know.
Why is it the bases of bubbles in water are white, and if they are placed in the sun they do not make any shadow, but, while the rest of the bubble casts a shadow, the base does not do so, but is surrounded on all sides by sunlight?
Why is it that the parts of plants and of animals which have no functional importance are round?
Why are contentious disputations useful as a mental exercise?
Why is it that in contentious disputations no trifling can ever occur?
Why do we feel more pleasure in listening to narratives in which the attention is concentrated on a single point than in hearing those which are concerned with many subjects?
The Witch of Eye Page 5