Sunday: A Travelogue

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish. – Terence McKenna

Sunday morning.

Late to wake, again. Again in a panic. Again, I startle to find a full-grown man in my bed. Eleven years together and that beard, those wide freckled shoulders. The hollow thud of déjà vus: Wake up, I dreamed you alive.

The air conditioner hums inside the window frame. The man in my bed sleeps. Rolls over and away.

Beside him, a glass tipped over in the night, water puddled around spare change, dimes magnified to the size of quarters. His arms flung back over his head, the right one bent like a blessing, index finger piercing the puddle on his nightstand. He is a vision, a symphony: atoms swelling into cells, surging into organs, crescendos of heart, brain, and skin. Nails gnawed to staccato half-moons. Even now, as his eyelids twitch in violet dream, he is dividing, multiplying, growing larger and more luminescent. In my halfsleep, he resembles an electric light bulb, long and thin, blinking on and off, onoff, on.

On my nightstand: Stendhal’s travelogue, Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio, published in1817.

Stendhal had been enamored with the city of Florence for years before finally arriving, at age eighteen, to kneel before Giotto’s frescoes in the Basilica of Santa Croce. Most profoundly, Stendhal confesses in Naples and Florence, the frescoes depict the life of St. Francis whom, in 1204, Christ came to visit as a six-winged seraphim. Subsequently, Francis became the first person recorded to bear the stigmata, the evidence that later bore him into sainthood.

In other words, the guy saw things.

In the fresco, Francis cowers on one knee in an oversized brown robe, his arms raised as if to put a shot, his right shoulder dropped, while Jesus hovers menacingly in the upper right corner, his six red wings clapping the air. He is small and devilish looking, actually, like an overfed mosquito you’d like to flick from here to Nebraska.

I can’t be sure, but what may have unnerved Stendhal most are the gold beams of light, like lasers, that shoot from Jesus’ right palm to Francis’s right palm, left foot to left foot, and so on. Five gold laser beams streaking across the painting like lightning, the fifth strung heart to heart. Over a palette of muted blues and grays and browns, the gold beams of light, boring holes into Francis’s body, electrify the foreground like a blessing, or a curse.

‘‘As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce,’’ Stendhal recounts, ‘‘I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart; the wellspring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.’’

In the two centuries since the publication of Stendhal’s travelogue, countless others have reported similar reactions to art. And it’s not always art, necessarily, but some other physical evidence of profound personal meaning. A temple in ruins, say, or a child’s bloodied lip. The Virgin Mary’s profile on a piece of toast. A Plath poem. The distant cry of a beluga off the Aleutian coast. Reports consistently mention rapid heartbeat, fainting, even hallucinations. Some people lose their breath, consciousness, or common sense. Loved ones are called and hospital visits are common. There are follow-ups with the shrink. Prescriptions for Xanax.

These days, we call this sort of experience Stendhal Syndrome. In other words, there are consequences to sneaking a peak up Creation’s billowing skirt. But not to worry, doctors advise, it’s psychosomatic. It’s all in your head.

Be wary of your worship, is how I understand it. Your art and your gods will bring you to your knees.

Eleven years in the same bed, but wedded only two weeks. What does it mean to be this man’s wife? To light the threads of a single, endless day until we burn out, self-immolate, turn to dust? We couldn’t even write our own vows. The officiant put the words in our mouths and we jawed them like dummies. We have much to learn.

This morning, like most, his body is sti√ in praise of the body’s creative imperative.

I am Stendhal and the Man is Florence.

Or I am just a girl, agog at a hard penis. Bodies are such strange terrain.

Whisper: I walk with the fear of falling.

***

Sunday mid-morning.

Swallow coffee and drive.

Vermont Highway 89 to Route 100 to Route 15 to Route 14 to Cemetery Lane to left at the General Store, three miles north to the gazebo in the center of town. The earth is a body pulled apart and splayed in the sun. Veining black rivers, pelts of grass, the green and fractured mountains ribbing the horizon: so much senseless beauty.

Human brains are obsessed with pattern because pattern is structure amidst chaos. And structure amidst chaos is meaning. Barring visions of Christ, which are not as common these days, finding pattern is the surest path to cognitive ecstasy. We desire connection above all else: the body in the landscape and the landscape in a body.

Pattern will keep you sane.

Timothy Leary: ‘‘To use your head you must go out of your mind.’’

The Greeks preferred three arts specifically: architecture (which keeps space under control), music (which brings noise under control), and of course mathematics (which brings the infinite under control).

Remember childhood? Those fleeting moments of pure love and joy. The sudden recognition of the pattern behind it all—like a distant memory. Children experience cognitive ecstasy daily. Round peg, round hole! Tree and ant and knee and sky, the child is just learning the narrative that binds these pieces of planet together. The earth provides a parent and the parent provides the language and the language provides the medium. Every moment, a new Florence.

It’s the rest of us who have to work for it. Drugs help—and are pretty cheap, relatively speaking—but art is more sustainable.

But at what cost? Stendhal reminds me.

Artists are madmen. Who will dispute this? They descend into the deepest reaches of the mind and come back with souvenirs, shoving them into our pockets like so many plastic key chains. This is not rational behavior.

Ernest Becker: ‘‘We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active work project . . .’’

I suppose the same could be said of the mother, the lover, and the mystic.

On top of the hill, the world spreads for me. From here, I could spy my enemy. I could brace for contact. I could map a language in the folds of the fields.

I am Stendhal and the Fields are Florence.

***

Sunday high noon.

There they are—my friends—sitting under the white gazebo beside an expanse of lawn. Fellow writers, Julia and Sean, with whom I meet monthly to discuss writing.

The poet, Julia, whose town we have descended upon, lives on a farm three miles to the east. She has organized a reading at her local library to take place later this afternoon. We will read from our published books, Sean and me, our own little spectacle here in rural Vermont.

Green lawn, white gazebo, green lawn, white fence, green lawn, white light. You see what I mean about patterns? They are not just recommended in this small town; they are law. Over there, a man in flannel repaints his aging white fence. Another draws a checkerboard in the lawn with his mower, the toppled shavings free lumber for the birds.

Virginia Woolf: ‘‘Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.’’

We sit in the shade of the gazebo and talk turkey. Talk poetry and fear of failure.

I gave a reading at a bookstore recently, says Julia, and the woman introduced me by saying only, ‘‘This is Julia. She writes about farming.’’ Like the Old McDonald of poetry.

Julia is forty-odd, strong-limbed, limned in tragedies unspeakable. Her resume is impressive; believe it. She finds the infinite in the language of the land. Makes miracles out of the digestive tracts of cows and the science of rotational grazing. Sure, she writes about farming, but it ain’t the half of it.

Look at her.

The blue and bolting gaze. A pair of long brass earrings.

I’m sick of being Julia the ‘‘regional poet’’ of Northern Vermont, she says.

As writers, our mission impossible is to find the words the world is made of and spread the seeds far and wide. Failure is our modus operandi, but because we’re all crazy, we keep trying.

What could be more fundamental and life giving and important than farming? says Sean, the woodsman, the adventurer. He is loudly enamored with his new and beautiful wife.

Sean published a book about finding home. He spent decades fleeing this place and that, searching and coming up empty, until finally finding home beside his beautiful wife.

Art is the pursuit of ecstatic understanding, we decide, the return to something long forgotten. The parting of Woolf’s cotton wool. The earth and its sacred math. The sky and its wise, punishing gods. Like relearning the empathy we were born with, I say.
Like trying to retrieve the wisdom of our ancient forbearers, says Julia.
Like touching inside the inside of our bodies, says Sean.
Ooh, we agree, that’s a good one.

I say, Sometimes I feel like a kid constantly running to my mother, excited to show her the worm I found in the garden. This living wet in my hand. Like, ‘‘Look! See?’’ But she only ever nods and wipes dirt from my cheek. Pats me on the shoulder. The old ‘‘atta boy.’’

Like the mystic tossed in the loony bin, I think. Like the scorned lover. Like the woman whose partner doesn’t understand why she must mold her big love into the shape of a child.

Here is some sacred math: A lunar month is approximately 28 days—the time it takes for the moon to go through its various phases. Human gestation is approximately 280 days, or ten lunar months. This is only one example.

I am Stendhal and the Words between us are Florence.

***

Sunday and a tipping sun.

Too late for lunch but we don’t care. We are hungry. Return to the General Store for kale salads, chicken curry, quinoa and sautéed apples, watermelon with feta.

Watermelon with feta? inquires Sean,
Oh, yes, say Julia and me in unison, watermelon with feta.

The morning’s coffee has left my system, having carved out a plummeting hole into which I will fall or fill.

I fill.

Half our picnic ladled into my face while Julia sets up the library chairs for our reading and the librarian checks her phone for messages from the great beyond and Sean greets his beautiful wife. She is cloaked in a long ruby sweater and cradles her husband’s neck in her delicate hands.

I watch her in hopes of learning something about how to be a wife. I watch her while I squirrel a bag of pita chips inside my purse, faint with desire. When you go out in search of the miraculous, said my novelist friend recently, you’ll find it everywhere.

After our reading, we gather on the library porch for wine and cheese, we readers and our small audience. This is A., says the poet, Julia. This is K. and G. and G.’s sister, M. We shake hands, smile, and talk. My teeth buzz and I am acutely aware of the space between my bare feet and the wooden porch.

A. makes the cheeses, soft ones that taste like dirt, like sex. I eat them greedily, one chunk and then another, between sips of a pale rose gone belly warm. My thighs sweat beneath my special dress and the silk dims with the sun.

They’ve all known one another for a lifetime. Maybe more, says A.

A. wears striped suspenders. K., a blue linen skirt. G. wraps her arm around M. and I feel a moment of well-deep loneliness. My family live so far away: down the mountain to trace the curve of the coast four hundred miles south and right into the hot sinews of Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. (From the Greek: phileo (love) and adelphos (brother).)

I have only one brother and you will find him there on a corner: chewed up, spit out, trying to wrest a fix from thin air.

I chose art and my brother chose drugs. We are both insatiable.

I am Stendhal and my Brother is Florence.

***

Then.

My mother was the librarian for forty years, says the new librarian. People still smile when I say her name.

A week from now, Julia will send me links to the articles she’s written about the people in her town: E., the loon specialist, G. the bookstore owner, R. the farmer slash bowl slash furniture maker.

I am the president of Julia’s fan club, says one woman, stout and white-haired.
No, I am, I say, and we smile and look each other in the face.

Say: Put up your dukes, old lady, and she does, lisping my shoulder with quick, light jabs.

Each of R.’s bowls has a story, Jula writes in one article, and he will tell me their histories when I ask: How about this one, R.? And that one over there?

The stories are about felled trees and the people whose land held the felled trees and the years during which the trees grew and were felled. Also, weather.

And for the trees he does what they cannot do for themselves: imagine the possibilities therein and through that imagining, make manifest that which has been imagined.

In other words, he turns them inside out to make art in the same way that we, as writers, turn ourselves inside out.

A woman in a dark dress approaches me. Her hair is a bowl carved in black and silver, sprayed and shellacked. She touches my arm and says Thank you for reading that story about your brother tonight. It really touched me. Says: I’m going through a hard time myself. You are very brave to read that here. We, too, look each other in the face and I can see that, yes, she is indeed going through a very hard time. I want to tell her that bravery has nothing to do with it, that I am the opposite of whatever brave is, that I am with her, and going through a very hard time, and let’s just stand here a moment more while you touch my arm. But instead, she shuffles inside and then away. Back down the mountain to home.

Annie Dillard: ‘‘Down is a very good place to go [ . . . ] out of your everloving mind and back to your careless senses.’’

All trees are women, but not all women are trees. I watch a patch of trees across the lawn bleed out into the darkening sky.

Simone de Beauvoir: ‘‘[One] is not born, but becomes a woman.’’

I am Stendhal and the Woman in the Dark Dress is Florence.

***

Sunday dusk.

Back down the mountain to home, where I am surprised to find the man in my backyard—hello, again—and also two neighbor boys, aged six and four. They tug at his shirt. Please show us your garden! they beg. Give us tomatoes! Give us strawberries! The man stiffens and backs away from the boys. Awake now, he looks at me and doesn’t have to say: I love you, but I will never give you children. A condition of being this man’s wife. Can I live with that?

But I harbor a secret: his body betrays him in sleep.
The boys’ mother is pregnant and reclines, stoic and regal, on her front porch. I watch her in hopes of learning something about how to be an artist. Her languor belies the ferocious desire and fortitude inherent in any creative act. She is not graced with child—as St. Francis blessed with the stigmata—but vigorously at work, a glacier carving the surface of the earth.

I am Stendhal and this Mother/Glacier is Florence.

***

Sunday evening.

We sit on the sofa on our separate sides on our separate computers doing our separate work. My feet are tucked beneath his legs. Separate, but touching.

A different man tugs on our front door, but it’s locked and he can’t get in. He stands in the porch light: blue shirt, blue hair, black beard, blue eyes. A Figure in Blue.

He lays his forehead on the glass of the front door and jiggles the knob. A stranger: young, drunk, sad. His eyes loll in his head and then find me there, staring back at him.

Jane? he calls.

I feel my heart clench in its cage.

There is no Jane here, I say. Go away.

His breath fogs up the window and he stumbles, rights himself, his hair smashed against the glass. He bangs on the door with his fist.

Jane! he cries. Jane, let me in!

You can’t come in, I say. Go away or we will call the police.

He pleads louder, willing her into being. She is a small and cowering Figure in Red, hiding behind my back.

Across the street our neighbors’ lights blink on and the strange man begins to cry.

Jane, I know you’re in there. Jane? Jane?

Her sweet breath on the back of my neck.

Jane?

He cries softly and looks me in the face, presses his extended middle finger to the glass. Fuck you.

When the police put him in handcuffs on the sidewalk in front of our house, he hangs his head and glares up at me, standing in the window. Slowly, he shakes his head back and forth, shrugs, and mouths words I can’t hear.
I know she’s in there, he seems to say.

I am Stendhal and the Figure in Blue is Florence.

***

Later.

Before Sean goes to sleep beside his beautiful wife, he sends a photo of the three of us—Julia, Sean, and me—on the library porch. It is sunset and the white clapboard behind us bears our crooked shadows. We are laughing at god knows what. Laughing, laughing—each of us looking in a different direction. Imagining: what?

What did I imagine so terrifying that I had to call the police? A welterweight too sad and drunk to stand on his own two feet, let alone threaten life or limb?

What I do not say to the man who sleeps in my bed: Turn me inside out to find my own little six-winged seraph carved into my body; a girl-child; a work of art.
I see things, too.

The day the man proposed, he led me to the shores of Lake Champlain, where all around us the sky and fields and mountains and sun and clouds and even the patient, humming moon looked on, and he entered the lake and knelt, his body submerged in the body of the earth, and he held up his hands in offer. It was not so much a proposal of marriage, as it was a request to keep close and tender for all the days and nights through which we will hurl through space, in this form or others, mere parts of a sacred whole.

The Figure in Blue went in search of himself.

Only—

I realize now what I recognized in his face: a reckoning with the limitations of the body. The ways in which we can’t get out and you can’t come in.

Everywhere, evidence of our efforts. We go crazy trying. Grasping at gold threads strung heart heart.

The man in my bed turns off the light and I reach for him in the dark.