The Needle's Eye Read online

  He was not an egoist, but the polar opposite:

  a believer in objectives.

  His was a land of cotton and uranium

  left now to the violent presence of machines

  with workers living in boxes, collectives and long wool coats, bare feet in boots, and who were still officials when splattered with mud.

  Drones buzzed overhead, a sound that

  made rats run in circles like dying parts.

  The women built the houses and beat the men.

  So the old love plot had seemingly died somewhere

  farther down the reel.

  Replaced by the field, the iron machine, the long ground and snow beginning.

  Miserable men who rape and snore, only one of them is this lowly Trotsky attractive to women like me.

  Some ideologues fight over a piece of thought, not even land.

  Though there are many women, there aren’t babies in this film, and the children are only in the schoolroom, one child holding onto her father’s leg.

  If I could see the script, but what if I never

  in my life see the actual movie again? The only sex is struggle as I recall. The star was pale Asiatic with fine lips.

  This woman puts her cheek down on a message and her tears turn the letters that are like eyelashes into a stream.

  The scholar says in Russian: “To have a happy life, this is the point of it all,” and in this casual remark he supplies the movie’s message. So the woman wanders into darkness where her mother waits inside with a pot of ink and a paper for him to sign.

  The filmmaker Khamraev is watching all this

  from behind the camera. Is he inventing it mentally immediately?

  Where is the milk for their tea? Two cows thin and lumbering up stones.

  Faces from all nations.

  Uzbek women, brown, pale Chinese, Mongolian, and Caucasian, figures falling in mud, the colored thread the only gardens, not even cabbage as far as I could tell.

  Bok choy, tat choy, where do these come from?

  Did they just eat beets and potatoes, bread and cheese, that reddish spot of jam carried from somewhere far away?

  No orchards, no berry bushes here. Briars!

  Yes, love is an eye in an iron needle that circles the globe.

  And ideology is no substitute for cotton against skin.

  These are the offspring of the Caucasus.

  They are looking for God like crazy and like Abbas Kiarostami.

  But the tapestry has fallen, the sky is empty.

  Whatever thread you pull will unravel the silk.

  When it’s all gone, what will remain

  except cut strings and a child without a name?

  You see, on film, a figure appear, then disappear, and what you are asked to do is hold the still moment, the interior flash, for one reason only: to understand whatever it is that is about to be seen next as something from the past.

  Plotinus said that color, as an attribute of beauty, is derived from the shape of a thing with its darkness pressed away inside.

  The future is set by the present, which is poised to fall forward and create new mysteries. The present is the cause of the future and unalterable. This is why some people can “see ahead” and animals, too, in their own way as prophetic members of the cosmos.

  The priest Florensky puts it this way: God thinks by things. The poet Williams: No ideas but in things. Some can’t be without God, and no one can explain why. It’s just a word. But without it, written into every strand of speech and thought, even though unmentioned, there is no light. “The light shining from St. Seraphim is perhaps the most powerful light that has ever shone in Russia” are the words of Florensky. Turner the English painter carried this sun vision to the canvas.

  Women who had to hide in convents to be free from fear and violation, to think, study, create, enjoy, had little color in their cheeks and hair.

  Now it happened one day in May 1917, in the turmoil of the Great War, three children came upon a vaporous figure in the woods. She was dressed simply. She had the melancholy expression of a girl who fears losing her childhood to new responsibilities. She looked as if she wanted to burst out of the red roses tangled in thorns around her hair and feet.

  However, she was not at all afraid of the children, and reached out to them, eager to speak, to warn, to promise. She was like an older sister who had fled the family, then returned just to see her little siblings, to let them know she would never forget them and what would happen to each of them in the future.

  She said she was in despair about the adult world, its cruelty to others, its violence to animals and its greed, and now she only trusted children under eight.

  The children were scared. She also talked about war, because they were just coming through one of the worst of them. They told her they liked her but trembled.

  She said she understood their fear and told them to prepare for a miracle she would perform just for them. It would happen at 6 a.m. on October 13, closer to their beach so the priests and people could come to witness it. Then she became the colors that surrounded her, then the blue of the sky, and disappeared.

  The children ran home breathlessly and gathered hundreds of people, including schoolteachers, atheists, fishermen, cooks, etc., and led them to the beach at daybreak on October 13 as instructed.

  The miracle came not as that teenage girl but as the sun at 6 a.m. It rose over the ridge of the sea in purple, nasturtium yellow, bold strokes of red and mauve. The sun wobbled. Then it rolled free of itself, turned into a silver disk that shot toward the beach like a flying missile. People screamed, fled, fell, scrambled, crawled, prayed, and screamed again.

  But the children and a few stalwart skeptics stayed where they were and were thereby privileged to see a second sun explode from the one left behind, and yank back the speeding silver missile, like a dog on a leash.

  The silver sun dropped to sea level and began its ascent again, obedient to the golden sun in the sky.

  Two suns then traveled peacefully together toward noon, like a dog and its master.

  What did it mean? One Benedictine monk held his ground to take account of the phenomenon, announcing, after, that the miracle was not the event itself, but that it came on time, as prophesied by the mysterious female. This was the only meaning and the only miracle that he was aware of, and it was good enough for him.

  Out of Range

  The first question in the catechism is:

  What was humanity born for?

  To be happy is the correct answer.

  Francis was happy once he was on the road with his friends. Up till then, some people in town threw rocks at him. They abused him as the children abused the priest in Christ Stopped at Eboli. They believed he was damaged mentally, so what the hell. They slapped mud on his face and hunched over, cackling at his surprise. They kicked him from behind, pushed him, and drew blood. This was when he began walking alone, staring out of his eyes in wonder.

  One day he cast off the threads he was wearing and stood naked on the edge of the forest. The crowd saw the lacerations they had left on his body and turned away, embarrassed.

  This is the Glory part of the Mass Francis never composed, because when he looks at them straight on, his cheeks are infused with colors. Years later he would have his eyes cauterized by fire.

  The curate, passing, asks children in a patronizing and suspicious voice:

  What is God?

  What do the Scriptures teach?

  How did God create the world?

  The curate moves forward with his lips pursed. In some way he resembles Joseph in Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

  Joseph is suspicious of Mary. His lips tighten when he looks at her but then the angel comes like a curete and his lips soften.

  John of the Cross in prison had his visions that emerged like the faces you see behind your sealed eyelids. Gold is not in the rainbow but it seeps into filmed images at surprising moments.

/>   Francis said to the pontiff:

  Why do we want to learn how to live wisely? I mean, if we are just going to die, why?

  For what purpose should we resist hitting people with our fists and spit? Why?

  If they are mean to us and we will die anyway, why?

  In 1950 Roberto Rossellini made a movie based on the life of Francis called The Flowers of St. Francis. The movie, black and white, was made up of a series of vignettes drawn from the popular stories of the saint, especially at the beginning of his life, and was shot with monks from a nearby monastery as the actors.

  It included flowers pulled from bushes, flowers as white and fluffy as molting goose feathers.

  Rossellini’s ethic in filmmaking was Franciscan: to use little money, shoot spontaneously, and edit not much.

  Like the “first word, best word” school of poetry, Rossellini mistrusted the process of refinement and treated his films as some might treat their notebooks, or first drafts.

  This method worked for a number of reasons. He was already a director comfortable with his techniques and he knew what the limits of his subject were. Complexity of character was not an interest of his.

  Rossellini, a man who loved women, was a Communist for a time and a Catholic as a child. He was deeply distressed by the Second World War and Italy’s behavior under Mussolini. He hoped Francis, as a radical pacifist, might redeem the shameful failure of his country to mobilize against Hitler.

  Also after the war, Rossellini made a movie called Stromboli starring Ingrid Bergman. The people around her were crude, violent, insulting. She found herself on a volcanic island, unable to escape. It was the forties and after all wars people experience themselves as displaced, loose, tossed, thrown backward and forward, families really, tribes.

  In the twentieth century, you saw whole families up to the very oldest, struggling to get away from a horror. Now it is mostly men, teens, men, teens, an occasional child and women on the run, petrified, so they look like soldiers without uniforms, soldiers never trained, soldiers without a leader.

  These are the meek, the weak, the losers who will inherit this battered earth.

  Stromboli had only a few hundred people living on it after the war. Many had left long ago. It is one of the eight Aeolian Islands and is in a continual state of eruption.

  Ingrid Bergman plays a displaced Lithuanian who married a fisher-man from this island when she was stuck in an internment camp. Anything to get away! But away from what? She is now a prisoner on an exploding island with strangers who look upon her with contempt.

  In the prophecy of Isaiah: “On that day, the remnant of Israel, the survivors of the house of Jacob, will no more lean on the one that struck them.” The remnants will return (having been seized and torn away and tossed into the sea like fish eyes) to the mighty God, the prophets say.

  She does realize all this in silence so her thoughts intersect with eternity momentarily. You can see it on her face and hear it in her final cries.

  There are places where the ego dies, but the spirit, or time, continues.

  Rossellini also made a movie called Fear, drawn from a novel by Stefan Zweig, and starring Bergman as an adulterous woman (like Bergman herself), and the movie was suffused with a deliberate confusion of identities: Were we in Germany or Italy? Where did the people come from? Terrifying and shiny black- and- white pictures of instruments of torture being tested on caged animals, yes, this was Germany, but Italy too, this was the weakness of Italy in the face of German technology, and Bergman, always Swedish, was being duped from first to last, and had only one redemptive scene with a nanny from her childhood remembering the countryside before the war.

  You can bless the immediate past if only for being so beautiful on the edge of night. The pencil of God has no eraser, said the Marcelin brothers of Haiti. But the pencil of time does.

  Francis was set apart from others by a persevering and resilient nature, by being ahead of his time, born too soon. If someone had good fortune, Francis would say the friend was blessed, where others would say he was lucky.

  Like Anna Magnani in Rossellini’s L’Amore, he was a throwback to a time when insanity slept beside church doors and knotted up cloth for a bed at night, talked to statues, or when she sobbed into a telephone to a man who was leaving her.

  A baby will totter and glide on her knees around the house for a full day with her fist closed tight on an orange seed.

  Pandora

  [Inside the box] she heard a disagreeable buzzing, as if a great many huge flies, or gigantic mosquitoes, or those insects which we call door- bugs, and pinching- dogs, were darting about. And, as her eyes grew more accustomed to the imperfect light, she saw a crowd of ugly little shapes, with bats’ wings, looking abominably spiteful…. They were the whole family of earthly Troubles. There were evil Passions; there were a great many species of Cares; there were more than a hundred and fifty Sorrows; there were Diseases, in a vast number of miserable and painful shapes; there were more kinds of Naughtiness than it would be of any use to talk about.

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tanglewood Tales

  F Plus

  In the seventies Cardinal Ratzinger was assailed for silencing the Franciscan liberationist theologians. He called them secular heretics and ideologues who would damage the Church by teaching people to solve their own social problems. But the populace got angry, and he had to relent a little, and allow them to speak again of religious humanism.

  Just around the time of St. Francis, the pope (Innocent) was obsessed with heretics and had the Cathars massacred in the Albigensian Crusade in France. This was a massacre like that at Masada, which was horrifying to even the most avowedly papist. Women and children were slaughtered while the surviving Cathars did not resist but stood their ground and held to their beliefs until they were silenced.

  Martyrs are not saints but something stranger, suicides. The Cathars held many of the beliefs that Francis himself did, regarding the horrors of power, greed, and slander, and in our day so did some thoughtful socialists and liberation theologians.

  To many at the time, Francis was simply called the Little Frenchman because of his small stature, and his love of French poetry, the moon, sun, and earth that he addressed in the second person.

  He continued to have the experience of earth and life on it as a single organism, each part vouchsafed to the other.

  Degenerating matter is as alive as young matter, even feistier sometimes, for life fights for life. The stony planets are vibrating as are the chips and bones and ashes on this flying rock. But is that really living? Only if empathy is pulling them around like gravity: an irresistible attachment to each other’s fate.

  Yeats tried to resurrect a flower from its ashes, then asked his friends, when this failed, to sleep with the ashes under their pillows and to write down their dreams.

  Like Yeats, Francis believed that magic was the definition of existence itself.

  What is a sister or brother but a person whose bloodstream has the same source as your own, whose near- invisible biodeterminants are yours too, who came out of the same waters and voice, and who has breathed on the same breast? I met a person who could taste the grass and herbs a beast had eaten in the meat on her plate. I only taste my tongue in a leaf of lettuce, a strawberry.

  Meister Eckhart wrote in The Aristocrat:

  “Back in the womb from which I came, I had no god and merely was myself. I did not will or desire anything, for I was pure being, a knower of myself by divine truth. Then I wanted myself and nothing else. And what I wanted, I was and what I was, I wanted, and thus, I existed untramelled by god or anything else.”

  Trainland

  “Is it nothing to you—all who pass by?”

  and Islamic School are scrawled on a wall outside the tunnel.

  Yellow smog, a dog’s broken barking.

  A bridge of snow on top of flat tenements and a slash of silver.

  It’s something to see: the geese float into a park by the Eas
t River.

  Randall’s Island, west to the Bronx. Cash and Smoke, FedEx.

  This is what I meant by loneliness.

  America Moving, Rosenzweig Lumber Company,

  Union Standard, vacated cells, blackened walls,

  Supermarket Equipment Depot,

  A boy is listening to women chatting. It comforts him.

  At the back of Co- Op City:

  a foul pond, two swans, and more snow.

  A cherry picker and a thousand ducks.

  My cousin, humming Om, is in his closet at home.

  A call from the Pelhams to the Wailing Wall.

  “I just got out of prison. What do you want me to do?

  Rob for a living?”

  To make it home before the blizzard becomes the point of all this

  that never should have happened in the first place.

  Electric Power Outlets. A prison, an iron net.

  Fog on the car’s glass.

  We passed through many days in one.

  Fourteen times the signs got in the way of the sun.

  Like Grown-ups

  Eye of the needle image

  Of the horizon destitute metal

  The I singular is also the Eye

  That through the tiny aperture can see the sky.

  —George Oppen, Seascape: Needle’s Eye

  For years I had a friend, a Benedictine monk (Dunstan Morrissey), who lived a hermetic way of life in California outside his community. It was not always so. The friend began his life in diplomacy and the Foreign Service.