The Witch of Eye

by Kathryn Nuernberger

  Isobel Gowdie, it seems, knew she was alive by how she was fighting. She cursed Harry Forbes, the man who first accused and then interrogated her, reciting three times the refrain: “He is lyeing in his bed and he is lyeing seik and sore, let him lye intill his bed, two monethis days more.” These confessions of maleficium, if they are evidence of anything, prove perhaps her real desire to give certain men what she thought they deserved.

  For a long time I couldn’t understand Brian and I couldn’t understand myself. Anger raised the veil. I cursed him with a packed bag in my hand. I said terrible things that made us really separate, that made it easy to see myself as separate in a way that women, so often known only as wives and mothers, have to fight to know. Once I understood myself alone, I understood him, maybe for the first time. It felt possible after that to know other people too.

  Hagstones emerge from boundary sites like caves and are powerful for being portholes born of portholes. In the hagstone’s eye we can see Isobel Gowdie for the bard that she was. Her confessions employ “powerful and vivid verbs, often in multiples: the Devil was ‘beating and scurgeing’; elf bulls were ‘crowtting and skrylling’; and the elf boys were ‘whytting and dighting.’” In the eye of the hagstone we see that so-familiar figure of the slumlord in the form of John Hay, the Laird of Park, trying to distract from and forestall his inevitable bankruptcy by crying witchcraft in the direction of anyone who grumbled at the sight of his face. We see Harry Forbes, the insolvent minister about to lose his congregation to changing theological tides and further undermined by credible rumors that he had an adulterous relationship with a servant. The trial cannot hold its glamour and we see this communion of judges, all deranged with fear they might lose a kind of power no one should have in the first place, pointing in the direction of persons they cannot, will not, see at all.

  My hagstone emerged from the Eminence dolomite, formed by a chemical solution in carbonate rock. Water moving through the cave was charged into a weak carbonic acid that never filtered back to a neutral pH. I have always preferred spells for dreams and visions to love spells. Though I am charmed by the love spell’s promise of human connection, I want something more powerful than another tepid rom-com. Charles Leland recorded a spell to activate hagstones in his nineteenth-century survey of European agrarian shamanic practices, Etruscan Roman Remains, which I have whispered into the ear of my stone:

  In the name of great Saint Peter

  And for Saint Blausius’s sake,

  By this stone I fain would see,

  What form the spirits take.

  In that year when I felt myself separating I was desperate for a vision. But I couldn’t tell in what direction of separation or desperation I was headed. It seemed almost funny to buy a volume called On Lies, Secrets, and Silence at the used bookstore. Though it was no joke I was hoping someone—maybe a philosopher or feminist theorist, a flyter or a witch—would give me permission to have the affair or go insane or disappear into a mysticism I didn’t really believe in.

  Instead there was Adrienne Rich, already dog-eared and underlined in faint pencil, insisting I had to figure out how I was going to live. “Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.” She adds, “The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life.”

  Because I could not bear to see him in tears, I agreed to stay for six months and see if we could change. But I was angry at those tears and what felt like my weakness, and in my anger I said every word I thought—how crazy I felt and how mean, the way I am never satisfied and cannot imagine a future where I ever could be. He was kind and I told him I believed his kindness to be a lie, so then he was less kind and in that way even more.

  It was a slow spell and often a very boring and repetitive one, punctuated by rituals like watching him run the vacuum cleaner and fold the laundry for a change while I repeated such refrains as “I am the opposite of sorry.” But in the end there was a transformation. I could see that he was not a cottar, I was not a witch, he was not a laird, I was not on fire. We were only each other. An apple tree grows in the front yard now, too young to bear fruit, but leafy and spreading her branches over the hyssop filling a bed at her feet. I look out at her in the morning while everyone is asleep and notice I am content.

  I have a friend who likes to ask from time to time if I am still in love. One of my answers is: I stayed because he wasn’t what I was looking for, but wasn’t not what I was looking for either. Another: I never could find anywhere to put it, so I carry this floating feeling of infinite possibilities I think other people call love. Like a person with nothing to gain and nothing to lose. It has made me more dangerous and more kind than I ever would have figured out how to be on my own. A little like a bird call, sometimes lilting and sometimes squawking in the perfect quiet of my ear.

  Brian spent the rest of that trip collecting hagstones and I will admit every night as he emptied his pockets of the day’s discoveries, some the size of an oak leaf, others no bigger than a violet, I saw him more clearly and loved him more truly than I ever had before.

  Double Vision

  My daughter is tall enough now to reach the stereograph viewer I bought at an auction for fifty dollars after intense bidding that left the auctioneer laughing at the way I jumped up my number, giddy like a rookie, and bid against myself.

  She lays on the couch in the bathing suit she never takes off and says things from behind that mask of carved mahogany eyes. “This waterfall gives me a papery feeling.” “The Eiffel Tower gives me a papery feeling too.” “This pig is sort of like nothing.”

  The paper feeling is a parlor trick. The glasses put the same image in front of each of your eyes, but the wooden divider down your nose keeps the optic nerves from synthesizing the two images in the usual fashion. They still become one, but in rough, shadowless perspective, as if foreground and midground have been cut loose and propped up like stage settings.

  After a while this sort of looking gives you a headache. The sensation of a mind grinding itself to reconcile two distinct pieces of information into one is not unlike the twinge I sometimes get when I try to understand the absurdities of things people have said they believed. The wandering uterus, for example, a geocentric model of the universe, Blue Lives Matter. It is the kind of headache for trying to understand why our courts have ruled that we can’t retroactively reverse the convictions of witches. In part, they say, because what’s the point? But also, because what do we know of what those long-ago judges knew?

  The philosopher Bertrand Russell explains the dilemma this way: “All our thinking consists of convenient fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream: reality flows on in spite of all our fictions, and though it can be lived, it cannot be conceived in thought.”

  Everything you think you have seen is actually your visual cortex conversing with the rest of your occipital lobe about their best guesses for smoothing out the many gaps in their sensory data to create a coherent image. Even if you actually saw Ursula Kemp’s lamb shake off his wool and clumsy hooves, to stand up straight as a demon man named Jack, you couldn’t really have seen it.

  People who don’t really seem to be listening have suggested I take comfort and refuge in the great sameness of our whole society of brains filling in the same sort of gaps with the same sort of logically blurred assumptions. They say we’re all in this together, so don’t worry about the impossibility of ever sharing in the same truth. But I have lived too much evidence to the contrary. I could only feel better if everyone was worried and admitted to being worried about the impossibility of sharing the same external reality. Then at least we could know we have worry in common.

  In a complete reversal from all the stories we usually hear and I usually tell, there was once a wom
an who couldn’t convince the villagers she was a witch to save her life. The man who wrote the account didn’t preserve her name, only that she was desperate to prove to her neighbors that she could fly and consort with demons. So she got them all to watch as she covered herself in a mysterious ointment that scientist-historians today think was derived from a poisonous mushroom. She passed out and while she was unconscious the people did everything they could to wake her—they shook her and said her name and hit her. Then they hit her a lot and burned her in various places on her body. But she did not stir.

  Later, when the ointment wore off she tried to tell them how she had been flying, but all they wanted to talk about were the things they had done to her while she lay there going nowhere. It took her awhile to feel the pain of their proof, but when she could fully sense herself again, she said she believed, regretfully, their version of events.

  This morning at the stoplight on my walk home, a man who has been walking our town’s streets with a cart full of everything he owns for the past few years was talking to me. The accounts of witches often remind me of how frightened the most secure people in our society are of the most vulnerable. Ursula Kemp, a widow who could barely keep her son fed, seemed to the warm and well-housed like the kind of person who would keep the spirits of two evil men and two evil women in pots on her stove.

  As this man, who is after all one of my neighbors, was talking to me in a language I could not entirely follow, I was aloof, but not cold, and agreed with minimal but not no eye contact that yes, he was right, when the light changed we would cross the street in the same direction. And yes, that was ok with me. I was sad that he felt like he had to ask my permission to cross together and wondered what had happened to make him think such permission was necessary.

  He held out his hand with a wry sort of smile and I thought we were going to handshake a seal of our mutual understanding and agreement vis-à-vis this business of crossing the street when the light changed.

  I guess I was dumb to assume I knew what he would do next, but he reminded me in his nervous sway and fleeting eye contact of other people without homes I have known and orphans and high kids and hungry ones and that time I taught high school in a place where we were all just a little on edge because of how the campus was ringed with barbed wire. I thought I understood well enough the kind of moment we were having. And anyway, I crave these little moments when the external world between me and someone else becomes the same for a minute. I like to think that kindness is a kind of nerve between two identical pictures set before two different eyes.

  But this man didn’t shake my hand or slide his palm or press his knuckles to mine in a gesture of solidarity and understanding. He just wove his fingers through mine and held on. The red light at this intersection, I thought, must be the longest a city engineer has ever invented. Finally I pulled my hand away roughly. I hated to do it; I didn’t want to be one more person afraid to touch him, but I also didn’t want him to become attached. I crossed in the opposite direction of him and of where I meant to go.

  I have a papery feeling today. More than most days, I have a papery feeling. This is not about the guy on the corner. It’s about why I no longer have the wherewithal to stand very long with the guy on the corner. He has nothing to do with the things that have happened, I thought, but I have something to do with the things that have happened. And lately I seem more a person who needs a caseworker than the caseworker herself.

  People who don’t really seem to be listening have given me a pamphlet that says all of this is normal. That one in seven women have been afraid for their safety or the safety of a loved one, that one in four have been just plain afraid. Within this subgroup, 67 percent report being afraid it’s never going to stop. Forty-five percent miss five or more days of work. One-third pack up their lives and try to start again somewhere far away. Statisticians have not asked how many of the women blame themselves for not having seen into the future of the mind of another person in a different reality, but anecdotally, I haven’t yet met the woman who doesn’t.

  The external world is scary for everybody if we pay attention. That is something else we could have in common, but somehow don’t. That is the part that frightens me. Also, that when I asked for help from the proper authorities, they said I was overreacting. I was trying to be careful and diplomatic about the extreme difficulty of truly interpreting another person’s meanings or intentions, so I did not ask why I was the only woman in a roomful of proper authorities. I am afraid they are right and I am overreacting, I am afraid they are wrong and I am not. I am afraid that we are nothing but metaphors to each other, two eyes divided by a line we can never cross. I am afraid that sometimes one eye goes blind, and neither of us can tell if it is mine or if it is yours.

  The Witch of Eye

  To read the history of Margery Jourdemayne, the Witch of Eye, is to ask over and again: Did any of it happen? Did any of it happen for the reasons we think?

  For years, leading up to her trial in 1441, Margery had been known as someone who could provide potions useful in advancing love, curing impotence, bringing about conception, or ending pregnancy. The wife of a cowherd, more often she was seen in the company of learned men, astrologers, and well-born ladies.

  Her client, Eleanor Cobham, was wife of the successor to a very young and sickly King Henry VI. Eleanor, it seems, wanted to know if the boy would die in time for her to become queen.

  For my part, I would prefer not to know the future, it being the place where I and others die sooner than I would wish. But I wouldn’t object to knowing whether there really is a future waiting for us, staying up late and worried into the night watching for our little lights returning home to punctuate the darkness.

  As we drive through the ancient pine forests of this sea-battered island as far from home as we can get, my daughter in a booster seat in the back, my husband with his eyes fixed on the road, I have been passing the time by reading us all fairy tales about deals with the devil.

  In general it is brothers or soldiers who have three years or ten to crack the whip that summons treasures or pull out of the coat’s magic pockets as much gold as they like. They know exactly how long they have to enjoy their life and they enjoy it heartily right up until that last month or year when they get clever about riddles and crafty about contracts.

  When they win their souls back, they win that big expansive blue sky of a life that is now nothing but the most exquisite pleasure of undeserved extra.

  I have not yet read the account of a woman making a pact with a devil that ends so well.

  The only accounts we have of women doing such things are in the court documents written to justify the violence done to them.

  Margery Jourdemayne was burned for treasonable witchcraft after constructing a star chart that foretold the death of the king. An act to which she confessed. She and her accomplices were also accused of, but denied, the more serious charge of trying to call up spirits from the infernal world by making an image in wax and then setting it before a fire to melt, “expecting that, as the image gradually faded away, so the constitution and life of the poor king would decay.”

  Bertrand Russell spends a lot of time in Our Knowledge of the External World thinking about what it means to use science and logical reasoning to know the future. He says, “It is necessary to shut out, by an effort, everything that differentiates the past and future. This is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, because our mental life is so intimately bound up with the difference.”

  I have spent much of my time in recent months trying to see into the future of another mind. And I have been trying to see into the past of how that person sees me. I have been spending much of my time walking a very large dog bought at some expense because she is the kind of large dog that makes a person step back and take a breath. I have been wanting to go back in time and make everything different. In a daze I have accompanied my husband on tours of one house after another, because our current address, it seems, cannot
be erased from the external world. I have been collecting documents for the affidavit. I have been on the phone with authorities trained to tell me they cannot speculate into the future from the collection of facts about the past in their files. I have spent much of my time in recent months learning about our responsibilities and vulnerabilities and liabilities to each other. Liabilities and vulnerabilities and responsibilities that include what I can and cannot say to you now.

  According to Bertrand Russell, knowledge of the future means real knowledge of each other. “Historically, the notion of cause has been bound up with that of human volition,” he says, laying out his axioms of logic through consideration of the case study he finds in Brutus’s assassination of Caesar. Desire, he says, “causes a certain act because it is believed that desire will cause the person’s act; or more accurately, the desire and the belief jointly cause the act.” He observes that “almost our whole vocabulary is filled with the idea of activity, of things done now for the sake of their future effects.”

  But when the desire is for a future that cannot be made to exist? Like the one I used to think I was walking into. Even if there are infinite futures, the one you want is probably still not on the list of what’s possible. Also, the number of potential outcomes narrows as you get closer to the moment that is the present. Which, depending on where you are when the walls are closing in, can be quite frightening.

  Bertrand Russell is trying to be helpful to all of us who wish to be safe from each other but also gentle and good and meaningfully connected. “What happens now can only be accounted for, in many cases, by taking account of what happened at an earlier time.” When we do not understand a person’s past actions or their present desires, when their gait is unsteady and they twitch in a way our old instincts regard with alarm, we might respond with fear or we might respond with anger. “People who have never read any psychology seldom realize how much mental labour has gone into the construction of the one all-embracing space into which all sensible objects are supposed to fit.” We might also respond with sorrow when someone cannot control their desires or their effects, and that there is nothing and never has been anything we could have done to change that.