The Needle's Eye Read online

  According to a thirteenth-century source, the Royal Chronicle of Cologne, the Children’s Crusade began around Easter or Pentecost of 1212: “Many thousands of boys, ranging in age from six years to full maturity, left the plows or carts they were driving, the flocks which they were pasturing, and anything else which they were doing. This they did despite the wishes of their parents, relatives, and friends who sought to make them draw back. Suddenly one ran after another to take the cross. Thus, by groups of twenty, or fifty, or a hundred, they put up banners and began to journey to Jerusalem.” Most were never seen again.

  The boy, their leader, had a tongue like a silver flute and he, like the Pied Piper, could persuade them with a whistle and a few words to march for miles, onward to Jerusalem.

  On the way the children and teens destroyed ancient temples and monuments, and anything else that reminded them of the past. The righteousness of childhood was theirs to act upon. They knew they could do way better than the grown-ups in creating a safe and verdant land.

  Many children had grown up on the stories of witches and the pale sifting sandman and their clogs clapped backward on the stones when they wanted to go home. However, their heads were twisted right off their necks if they dared to turn back.

  After all, their boy leader had a letter direct from Jesus that proved this uprising was their destiny.

  But they fell into the sea or society and disappeared.

  So it was that the Children’s Crusade ended in tragedy like the grown-up ones. Sheep in a panic can leap off a grassy cliff to the rocks below and birds in a flock will dive sometimes to the ground.

  Who could possibly deny that the kids wanted happiness and peaceful lives just like grown-ups do? How else explain the righteous indignation that led them to bind up their little sisters and drag them by the hair on their way to Jerusalem?

  It’s true they were children and poor, and many of their parents wanted to get rid of them anyway. Some parents had already used them as bucklers and shields against rapists and murderers, sending them out ahead, to appease the enemy with any kind of sexual favor.

  The legendary figure of the Pied Piper, thin and long in his colored rags, with a flapping red hat and long green whistle, reminds me of the sly features of a pedophile I once encountered.

  Wonder-Horror

  Loudun in France is a small town near Poitiers built on a hill surrounded by wide plains.

  “A cluster of belltowers surrounded by fields.”

  It was built on an eminence, a hilly place with circular paths rounding the keeps.

  The town played a part in the religious wars, favoring the Protestants in the end.

  One October I wandered on narrow streets and plazas, past the Gothic St. Pierre du Marché, Sainte Croix, once a Renaissance church, the Palais de Justice, and many old fortifications. All of these places were parts of one shocking story of madness and exorcism.

  Most of the walls had been softened and sunk by war or peace.

  I was following the ghost of Michel de Certeau, a Jesuit historian. Like Weil and Oppen, our bodies were heading in different directions and in different years. But as a partial panpsychist, I recognized his thought as floating near my own. I recognized his questions. Where would we find sense if not in madness and folk stories that contemplate our limits from the outside?

  We walked up a hill alongside a Roman wall.

  The air was soft, warm, autumnal.

  Men were machine-blowing leaves around.

  Plane trees, elms, and chestnuts.

  Towers dotted the corners of walls, one with banners.

  Then we came to the Crossroads of the Sorcerers

  where the priests had come on their way to the Ursuline sisters who then, themselves, walked down to the town for their public confessions.

  Small in size for so many immured inside.

  Chalk limestone and yellow.

  Once the nuns and their novices wandered around inside, singing.

  Not just here, but in several monasteries and convents in this small hill town.

  A soft mist covered the plains beyond.

  We found pretty wildflowers growing amid the stones

  including one that snapped shut when you touched a petal.

  And then we went back down and visited the museum

  where Certeau found much of his material for his book.

  Here were the documents he needed and used, pictures for his study of these women and some writing by their scapegoat, a voodoo doll under glass studded with chicken feathers, and the heart of a black hen.

  These effigies were leftovers from the exorcisms

  that took place in the early seventeenth century.

  Certeau’s ghost was concerned with spiritual struggle, deceit. Belief and unbelief. Who can you trust? Who is telling the truth? In a plurality of ideologies and religions, who can you believe will save you? This question haunts political and social acts as much as it does the religious. Whose speech is authentic speech?

  As it turns out, the possessed nuns in Loudun did not believe their exorcists—priests they already knew—enough to be saved by them. Instead they laughed at their rituals and refused to be healed. This example of a failure of words to persuade and save was one that signaled the end of a social contract.

  The story of the possession is this: In the small town called Loudun, there was an outbreak of the plague from which people became dreadfully ill, fled, or, more likely, died. The plague found its way into the several religious houses in this town, split between Huguenots and Catholics.

  The streets reeked of sickness and the corridors indoors were awash with the specters of those who had died putrefied. The nuns and their child students inside the walls tore through the halls, playing ghost tricks on each other. The plague drifted away, but in games like this its taste remained.

  In this atmosphere one Ursuline nun after another began experiencing a takeover of her mind by so-called demons, each of whom she named and placed in a specific part of her body. It could have started as child’s play: hearing ghosts, acting them out, doing voices, assigning names. In any case these forces grew large, took over, and made her utter obscenities, heresies, and speak in tongues and masculine registers. The convent, seemingly immune to diabolic forces, had been infiltrated.

  The uninvited and unwanted came in the cloak of invisibility, morphing through the bodies of the young.

  The demons made each sister whirl like a dervish, contort like a yogi into impossible positions, back arched, supported only by her toes, and her eyes rolling back. These contortions were similar to those of Indian mystics when in an ecstatic trance. In this case the women turned their fury on the clergy.

  Certeau described the situation poetically:

  “Even though the tongue is the manifestation of the inner movements, the head is deception in relation to the celestial, human, or bestial heads that cannot be seen.”

  The nuns were young and ripe. Like a pack of Pinocchios half wood, half donkey, half human. Each part of their anatomy was dangerously alive on its way to daily lessons.

  Gales of laughter preceded them or they succumbed to the post-plague ghouls and cried out in pain and foreign tongues.

  The father confessors from nearby monasteries came rushing along the winding roads to hear the sisters’ confessions and to note them down, to tap their bellies and thighs and peek down their throats, to attempt to rid them of their foreign agents. But the priests were unsuccessful at chasing away demons and instead became victims of the nuns’ rebukes and abuse. Sexual innuendos were rife, coming closer and closer to actual sexual contact between each other and the priests. The mother superior and others then developed a fixation on one priest in particular, whom they accused of seduction and sorcery. The poor fellow was a victim of selection, a victim of embodied imagination, too welcome and too remote.

  He was Father Urbain Grandier. His worldly name and good looks, his imperious manner, and his belief that clerics should not be celibat
e, while he acted on this belief, made him the obvious target.

  Grandier insisted over and over again, under excruciating grilling, that he was innocent.

  But no matter what he said, or what he did before he said it, he was not believed.

  One official document described Grandier like this:

  “When he spoke of God favorably he meant to speak of the Devil, and when he detested the Devil he meant to detest God.”

  Language had lost its mind. Grandier was in a no-win situation, at the heart of a double bind. Words were the problem. A vocabulary had lost its truth value. No one believed what anyone else was saying.

  Despite many attempts by his friends to exonerate Grandier of the charges leveled against him he was burned at the stake in the public square. By this time there were people, including medical doctors, coming from everywhere to watch the nuns writhe and speak filth, to interpret their words, and now to watch the public burning of the selected seducer and sorcerer.

  Literally thousands came to watch this outdoor theater. Those Capuchins who had promised Grandier that they would strangle him before setting him alight did not do him that favor, but broke their promise and went at him with flaming straw.

  We must imagine that by now Grandier was glad to escape the world. He was innocent of the crimes.

  Certeau saw the event as marking a change in consciousness:

  “Devils and angels enter the human world as the cosmology that placed them in a celestial hierarchy

  begins to crumble.

  “Conversely, men become angels or devils. The boundaries blur.”

  Certeau wrote in a footnote to his illustrations: instead of the assigned hierarchies that had kept people in their places, now “a figure of power emerges: man. Child of the world.”

  On the Bowery

  On a cold winter night I watched (by chance) a documentary called On the Bowery; it was directed by the American director Lionel Rogosin in the late 1950s. Rogosin was a pioneer in independent film who used fiction and documentary elements in his movies, which were fueled by moral outrage. He went to the Bowery, where he found derelicts and drunks, left over from the chaos of wars abroad, and he enlisted a group of them to act with a trained actor. They all improvised under Rogosin’s direction to make this film, which shows survival and failure in equal measure. It took several months to make and carries with it, even now, a rare attention to the hands, faces, and stark environment usually reserved for documentary. John Cassavetes admired the movie, as did many others in independent film in America.

  The Bowery was a place where I lived in the 1960s, and the film showed it exactly as it was, and as it felt to be there then. The Bowery was one place I never wanted to return to; but now, it had reappeared in front of me in a warm apartment on a cold night in Boston.

  The Bowery was a place of personal failure, failure of nerve and failure to grow up, failure to love though there were friends, friends who were lost in exactly the same wide Bowery world. A failure to thrive, used as a medical term for sick children, is one definition of poverty offered by the theologian Gutiérrez. I drank from a brown bottle of paregoric as I wandered Tenth Street to see the other kids, those who were insane on other kinds of drugs.

  In the film there was an elevated train that darkened Cooper Square and, farther down toward Houston Street, some artists’ lofts with enormous battered elevators were in use. But in the area where I lived seven years after the film was made, the El had been torn down, shattering light on the stone. In those days drunks were remnants of wars fought in Germany and Korea. Now there are white women and men of one shade and age or another who hit their heads against walls, pull on leaden pipes drilled into walls, kick, laugh, dance, run in front of cars, mad on meth and mirth.

  Between East Second and Third Streets there were small-roomed flea-hopping one-night hotels. I stepped gingerly over bodies going up and down the staircase. I was there during the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. It was cheap but still to me expensive, because I could barely eke out a living and shared the rent with another girl just as helpless.

  We often lived in darkness, unable to pay the bills. The rent was 235 dollars a month. Two bedrooms in back, and a living room and kitchen looking out on pigeons shitting on car windows, and men with rags cleaning it off.

  In this film I saw the doorway to my apartment, the same storefronts, and a gray colorless haze I recognized. Nothing on the outside had changed. Recognition (like selection) can be good and bad.

  Watching On the Bowery my body went on alert as if I were inhaling opium vapors that would fill my eyes with hallucinations. I saw the past tunneling around and then pouncing on me.

  In that apartment Eric Emerson, a young Warhol actor who sewed (needles stashed inside his lips) and danced with long yellow hair, dropped DMT secretly into my coffee when I told him I would never take drugs.

  I was already too close to psychosis to mess up my brain with anything extra, I told him, but he did it anyway.

  This dancing boy was an illiterate, a pauper, homeless, like a shepherd you might encounter on a road at the time of Francis, who poured out visions and opinions and never stopped moving.

  He was naughty and easy prey. He was haughty and heartless. Adolescent. You can see him masturbating still in Warhol’s films although he long ago died, tossed out onto the street after an overdose.

  The mental chaos that followed his giving me that drug ripped a hole in my inner veil that could not be stanched. It was open, palpable, like a textile with supernatural life in it, and a reminder of how close to madness the love of God must be, because only through debasement and terror did mercy shine, shine around the lines.

  Like a patch of thick cloth on a thirteenth-century tunic, bundled in to cover a cut in the material, the forty-eight hours following that dose stayed sore and ready to spread at any time.

  Years later a religious friend spoke of hallucinatory experiences he had had, and how they had bottled him like a genie inside a glass and he could never break free, but only study the world as a show of smoke and reflections.

  He (Innokenty) advised me: “Go to the movies instead of going mad. Get a dog, take long walks, warm baths, cups of tea, read Rilke, sit on the steps of churches. Or just go inside and sit there. But movies are the fastest way to readjust your relationship to the real. Go!” He was a very thoughtful person, a throwback to the Moscow School of Film, who went into the Caucasus to shoot ordinary people.

  He told me he was tempted to enter a monastery but that he would never become a priest because people would call him Father. He imagined people coming to his bedside, one by one, whether changing a liquid or giving an injection, with religious questions, and he was right because even when he was dying I leaned down to transcribe what he said!

  He said Simone Weil was “a secular monastic” and should be given the status of prophet for that way of life, a life that chooses to live alone and die when the body is ready.

  My friend, when young, was tall, dark with high Mongol cheekbones and loose hair, and was not a poet or writer, but an avid reader who wrote in private notebooks his ideas, plus badly translated poems by Innokenty Annensky, the Russian poet, his namesake. He had many projects that he never completed.

  He planned to retranslate this quatrain:

  And for the heart with pain and shame,

  A dream comes, tender and deceiving:

  As a crystal in the candles’ flame,

  To stay in cold of lilac singing.

  We became close when reading Weil’s New York Notebook side by side on a bus:

  “For living man here below, in this world, sensible matter—that is to say, inert matter and flesh—is like a filter or sieve; it is the universal test of what is real in thought, and this applies to the entire domain of thought without exception. Matter is our infallible judge.”

  We talked about the doors of perception, Genet, movies, visionaries, and translation. My thoughts mingled with his for our bodies were close
together when, in a bed, we talked. He played saxophone at night and came back intoxicated one way or another. Over the long run, he worked on experimental film projects with others, never finished anything, made very little money as a translator from the several languages he knew, and went to live on a monastery farm where he pulled up the underground roots.

  Drug-induced hallucination can burn holes in the gooey veils of matter that surround our inner organs at conception. Minty and Edie Sedgwick had irreparable rips in their veils. Minty could not tell the cops his own name when he was sitting in Central Park. My friend told me that I should not have put the news about Minty out of my mind so hastily, with fear of it, because fear showed a lack of love in me. I feared more than I loved, if I could not tolerate hearing about Minty going mad and hanging himself in the Tombs in Manhattan. I feared this story because I feared insanity coming again and being between reason and unreason all the time. If I had loved Minty I would have set aside time to pray for him every day. Instead I had sobbed in my heart, changed the beat, turned it into handwriting, when I should have sat quietly remembering. My religious friend was there, on the Bowery, when this suicide happened, and so he had the right to say these things.

  Memories blink and flash and capture moments of the past in sepia and gray, like the glimpse of a distant place, far beyond where you are standing. The distance, like the past, is blurred. Kids and old people forget about keys and phones and scarves and pills, because these are not primal needs but secondary to the animal who is half asleep in us. They join like shadows at the end of day.