The Needle's Eye Read online

  Do you know what Alina wanted?

  Her father sitting at a distance at dusk

  Smoking and quiet.

  His cognac in one hand, the other loose.

  The Nymphs without Names

  “When your time to give birth arrives,” Gaea counseled her daughter, “go to the island of Crete and take refuge in the deep, hidden cave high on the slopes of Mount Dicte. I shall see that nymphs nurse your infant son with goat’s milk, and I will have them hang his cradle from a tree so that Cronus will not be able to find him on land, or sea, or in the air. Young boys, the Curetes, will march beneath his cradle, clanging their spears against their bronze shields to smother the sound of his cries.”

  —Hesiod, The Birth of the Gods

  In ancient Greece young boys were called Curetes. They were gods of the wild mountainside, inventors of the rustic arts of metal working, shepherding, hunting, pruning vegetation, and beekeeping.

  Like other gods they were spirits who covered the sky and the ground. They were both real boys and children of the clouds. The Curetes were also the first armed warriors, and gods of the orgiastic celebration of violence performed by the youths of Crete.

  The Greeks understood that some boys were like hurricanes frenziedly dancing and destroying.

  Most gangs include an illiterate, a mental case, a simpleton, a bully who commits all varieties of lunatic acts. They laugh with cracks in their voices and can’t be at ease or happy in this life. Oh how they hate it!

  Some have visions while they move through crowds; they see without wanting, recoil without striking; they are like the old; they are like Prince Myshkin when he sees each day as a magnificent theater piece brought on by the sun. Kindness is the only grace that can lift their spirits and give them hope to go forth like a bottle of cold champagne bandaged in linen, tipped and smoking.

  For the Greeks, wrote Hannah Arendt, “imbedded in a cosmos where everything was immortal, mortality became the hallmark of human existence.”

  “To move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order.” This, she said, described existence.

  None of it remembers itself, except as disconnected brain images, resurrected particles, existing simultaneously here and there.

  The gangs of Curetes, half pagan, half sky, and half wounded children, may return as extras and balancers when our beliefs are changed by catastrophe. But for now, they are ordinary boys.

  In Prism

  Francis was born and died in Assisi, central Italy, around the turn of the twelfth century. He was a gallant and charismatic boy who sang the songs of the troubadours, believed in the love they described, and showed poetic and musical gifts of his own. We have read that he was humiliated by his cloth-merchant father and ran off to join the military but got whooping cough and had to turn back. On the way he tried to save face by joining a band of rebels and ended up in prison for a whole year. This marked the violent and dark night of his soul when he stopped singing or smiling. He learned instead to pity, to weep, to promise all kinds of service to God if he could just be free. Oscar Wilde in his book De Profundis describes the same ordeal from his prison cell, and how he will survive it.

  “Nature … will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt; she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”

  For millennia people have wanted a God and a sky where knowledge and history are stored, so that when someone punches you or kicks you down the stairs and there is no one else but the evil one beside you, you could look up from the ground and say, “God knows what you have done.”

  It seems important that every act is accounted for, even if it goes unpunished, I don’t know why, or why the sky is the repository vault. Perhaps knowledge finds bliss in the sky, among its gold domes and gray fish bones and wings.

  Francis was an idealistic teenager, an iconic candidate for today’s teenage gangs and jihadis. He had what they call “a magnetic personality.” He dallied with many women and then, abruptly, stopped and would not look a woman in the face again unless it was Clare Offreduccio, he was so afraid of the power of his own attraction for others.

  In those days, the towns and cities were always at war with each other as some countries are now. There was a surfeit of brutality; boys were raised to bully and attack. Armies were organized for this purpose, and teenage boys could join up and get a horse and sword and ride furiously, righteously to the kill. At home babies were fondled as sex bundles from their first scream on, their animal parents panting with excitement over their cherubic crevasses. Girls were alive for the purpose of giving pleasure to men, be it uncles, brothers, or strangers, who managed them and violated and manhandled them along with the women into their teenage years. There were no locked doors except at convents. Girls were like deer prancing through the house, delicate, ephemeral, sexy, and skittish.

  Childhood could be marvelous at times. The wildness of it, the singing, dancing, and mucking around with the cows and sheep.

  Almost everyone was nearly a slave: whacked a lot across face and head, put to work first thing, and sent out to do the dirty job, until they were old enough to join the troops. Some kids had fun with all of this. Francis especially. He was one of the wildest, funniest, most talented, sexiest boys on the block, loved his mother, and loved rolling around with girls and getting it on.

  War and prison killed all that.

  While Francis’s boyhood was entirely normal for his time, and sex and swords were part of it, he died to these joys in prison. He grew ill during his conversion from freewheeling teen to prisoner to man. When he came out, he would not lift his hand against anyone. He was, in the eyes of his father and others, a weakling.

  The last recorded encounter with his father describes Francis taking off all his clothes and standing naked in front of the furious man. Then he lay on the ground on his back as if he were laying his life down, the way lovers do, or having his body prepared for funeral rites. He pushed his heap of clothes toward his father and focused on the clouds (gray ropes, a net, a grille).

  A nail bomb is a device packed with nails. The nails act as the shrapnel in the explosion and are stuffed into the pot with steel BB balls, broken razors, darts, etc. and can produce a huge explosion.

  Nails, nails everywhere. In flesh, in eyes, in the tar underfoot.

  (At the end of his life Francis had nail marks on his feet, square with the heads going all the way through to the ground.

  The wounds were clogged with blood and rust.

  The hand wounds were cut into his palms and came out the other side.)

  Sometimes teens exist “as if they were sunk in sleep and found themselves in troubled dreams—either fleeing somewhere, or powerlessly pursuing others, or delivering blows in brawls, or themselves suffering blows, or falling from a high place, or sailing through the air without wings. Sometimes it even seems as if they are being murdered although no one pursues them, or if they themselves are murdering their neighbors since they are sullied by their blood.”

  These words, from the Gnostic Gospel of Truth, describe the midpoint between wondering what the world is, and time, and being horrified by both.

  The Pseudo-Dionysius said (in the Commentary of Aquinas) that “the more distant the soul is from the body, the more available it is to the influx of spiritual substances.” So it is, in the sleepy tween, secrets arise and ecstasies, for the brain is not adapted to its own nature. Teenagers have waves of homesickness, later identified as postcoital sadness, even when no sex has been tried. They are not at home in their given family or in the world. They are unheimlich. They long for a sanctified space for themselves, a place of safety. The homesick feeling arrives like syrupy cake, soaks into the pores of the person as a foretaste of sexual gratification and its convulsive solitude.

  To play music, to dance, to do drugs, to sp
eak poetry, to be athletic, a martial artist and a runner: these are the best, the only ways for an adolescent to avoid jail.

  Released from the prison where he languished and wept, Francis ran into the forest and up the mountain and dashed over dust and stone to sing again his praises to his natural family, the trees, brooks, birds, trembling flowers, and wolves. He could feel their phlegm in his blood, he could feel that business of atoms and cells in the grasses that brushed his bare feet, and know they were the same as his own.

  Hundreds of years ago certain people were visited by spirits inside their rooms, and they recorded them carefully. Some others had encounters with voices and angels on the road outside.

  There is this story about Francis and Clare told by the theologian Leonardo Boff.

  They were in love when they were both young, she a rebellious teen sneaking out at night; they sometimes met in secret, and aroused suspicion among their neighbors. Clare was not one to be told what to do and what not to do. Her response to Francis was irresistible joy, the kind that is familiar through the ages. She pulsed with desire, she ran to calm it, she felt it again and rushed again, they hid in bushes and caves and struggled through their clothes for union, to become one person.

  But one day Francis asked Clare when they were alone: “Did you hear what people are saying about us?” Clare didn’t answer. She felt as if her heart had stopped and if she spoke, she would cry. “We ought to stay apart,” Francis told her. “You go on ahead and you will be safe before nightfall. I will travel alone, following you, when I can.”

  Clare was afraid he was saying good-bye to her and collapsed in the middle of the road but then she remembered her dignity, the privacy of her own desire, got up and continued on her way, without looking back. The road led into a white forest that should have been green. But suddenly it was winter with thick snow weighing on the branches. Snow is silence, and little parts of it fall so nothing can be heard. This snow crunched like leaves or crystals.

  Now Clare grew anxious again, being alone and cold and still in many ways a child. She paused a few minutes until her voice called out of her doubt: “Will I ever see Francis again?”

  She heard the voice of Francis respond, “When summer comes, when the roses bloom.”

  Then the next thing happened, time leaped over time or backward. Francis loved to somersault and so maybe this was his show. Time had fun being a new sun set to a different time. It was as if over the fields covered with snow there had suddenly opened thousands of multicolored flowers. Wild iris, blue cornflower, daffodils, violets, and red rugosa roses. Overcoming her bewilderment, Clare leaned over, made a bouquet of the roses, and gave it to Francis, who now was suddenly beside her. And from then on, the two were never separated.

  In the future Francis always kept an untended garden for wildflowers, weeds, and herbs in the friary. He called Clare his “little plant.”

  She was his garden, the wild and hidden girl he could visit with his eyes turned down. For the rest of their lives they lived near to each other in their separate religious houses but they were one in their revolutionary vision of a new social order that included world failure. They achieved a kind of erotic suspension that kept them alive and fierce until they died. An ideal of celibacy.

  Later Clare recalled Francis on one mysterious occasion in her room. “He seemed to her to be a gold so clear and brilliant that in him all was reflected as in a mirror.”

  Gold and mirrors were recurrent images for Clare as they have been for many solitaries reflecting. Because lots of young religious were perpetual children, the experience of receiving and submitting to the sensible world was still a shock.

  The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote this about his life project: “I am [therefore] studying the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion, and yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own.”

  Through the real recorded years of history Clare and Francis glimpsed and influenced each other and she nursed him when he was recovering from eye surgery, and before he went into his final retreat in the mountains and died. Following his rule since she was a late teen, Clare herself lived in voluntary poverty, refusing over and over again to break the most radical and fundamental of Franciscan rules: not to own or be owned. Her order subsisted on bread and tea and potatoes meted out in small portions. The female members of Clare’s birth family lived in the enclosure beside her. This helped her to “be herself” and to be courageous in demanding an order of poor women, those who followed Francis in his most extreme rules.

  She crossed through time and space in her room. It’s said that she could lie in bed and watch the Mass being enacted on the wall of her room and hear the words emanating from the figures there, one of which might be Francis in another building.

  Clare lived longer than he by many years and continued to meet his phantom in her cell where she often lay down, being ill and underfed. Here is one supernatural encounter she described happening a few years after he died.

  She told one of her sisters—Philippa—“how once, in a vision, it seemed to her she brought a bowl of hot water to Francis, along with a towel for drying his hands.”

  She continued, saying that “she was climbing a high stairway, but was going very quickly, almost as though she were moving on level ground.

  “When she reached Francis, he bared his breast and said to Clare, Come, take a drink.

  “After she had sucked from it, the saint admonished her to drink once again.

  “When she did so, what she tasted was so sweet and delightful she in no way could describe it.

  “After she had drunk, that nipple or opening of the breast from which the milk came, stayed between her lips. When she took what remained of the milk in her mouth into her hands, it seemed to her it was gold so clear and bright that everything was seen in it as if in a mirror.”

  This account of her vision was not included in Clare’s authorized biography. Eyes only look one way, so where are the eyes that see backward into our brains?

  A person falls into a very deep sleep—the sleep described in the Upanishads and the Vedas, where it joins with the universal spirit that underlies phenomena.

  In Clare’s vision, beyond the conventional symbolic interpretations of the staircase, the male breast ejaculating milk, the mirror, etc., lies the emotional nature of her dream with its rush and struggle, its exchange of fluids equally, water for milk, and its resolution that brought the peace of reflection, a spherical bowl and a mirror. One part is all hunger, the other luxury.

  One is failure, the other accomplishment. In other words, the dream replicates creative activity, erotic and symbolic.

  It is the bare male breast producing milk that forms the miraculous stretch of the dream: something fresh but potential, something in suspension through evolutionary years. Why men have nipples, nobody knows.

  A man called Father is a mother to a woman who is his daughter. The dream is so open, I can’t any longer think of Francis and Clare without believing they had this encounter in life. Some dreams are always awake, waiting to be activated.

  Clare would kiss the wall of her cell when she entered it and then lie down on her bed and watch the visions pour in and out. They were not voluntary, but she had to stretch out in full and prepare herself for them, attentively. She had sixteen dreams and visions that confirmed her saintliness.

  She waited, as if for the beam of a passing candle to float across her body. It might and it might not. Clare was the most committed warrior when it came to her order, the most loyal to the Franciscan ideals, which left her half-starved for most of her life.

  In 1958 Pope Pius XII designated her the patron saint of television thanks to the way she projected the Mass on the wall of her cell.

  Projections

  This was many years ago, and drawn from
a film by Ali Khamraev: women made and wore colorful clothing in the mountains of the Caucasus during the Stalinist reign. Clouds steamed in the yellow grass and clump-coated trees. The snow fell on bent fingers.

  Only the lucky had red jam to spoon up with tea.

  The teacher was an intellectual with a prim beleaguered face.

  During these Soviet times he was a Trotskyite

  and a profoundly religious man

  who sometimes began his classes with a quote from The Letters of a Sufi Master:

  “Shaykh al-‘Arabi al Darqawi said that the soul is an immense thing; it is the whole cosmos, and it is the copy of it. Everything which is in the cosmos is to be found in the soul; equally everything in the soul is in the cosmos. Because of this fact, he who knows his soul knows the cosmos.”

  The schoolteacher took this to mean that the thinking part of the body, the brain, is a divine organ in the search for meaning and thoughts are as holy as prayers, fasting, meditations, and acts of charity. But he was a modern too, and knew it was only a question of vocabulary. There were scientists who had the same insight but used a duller language for it. Their words could make children cry.

  He would say:

  “Dreams in their poetry affirm the divine nature of the mind. Its freedom and insights into life on earth among phenomena must be lifted up high for everyone to see.”

  He spoke of continuing revolution in his early years but later of continuing revelation.