The Needle's Eye Read online

  Francis had ecstatic visions that may have been produced either by a weakness in his optic nerve, or else by the pressure of the visions themselves on his optic nerve. Whichever the case, his eyes blurred and hurt. He seemed to be receiving signals from the sky.

  Life in twelfth-century Italy was probably not much different than it was imagined in the mountains of Colombia where people hid their lives away, wearing tunics cut as coarsely as the tunic of Saint Francis. Robert Gardner filmed such people in the 1980s.

  Michel de Certeau said in White Ecstasy he himself had the “Franciscan dream: that a body might preach without speaking, and that in walking around it might make visible what lives within.”

  Oxygen is like a soft grain that has passed through a mill in the skies. It is what we live on, this air, and it has kept the stones (stars and meteors) from thundering down.

  The lightness and proportion of the air is what some call Love. If it thickened and choked us, we would hate our own lives.

  Physical weakness liberates visions, and the test of whether they are signs of madness or grace is the behavior, afterward, of she the person who reports on her experience. If she is sensible enough to continue with her labors on behalf of others, she is considered sane.

  A person can feel the impression of a soft body of air indicating presence or further life on her hands or arms or anywhere, sometimes in stillness and safety, and understand that the entire universe is held against her skin in an equilibrium that holds her steady for her life span. Too great a sense of the tremendous explosion of creation in which we live would obliterate us. We feel what we can on our skins and through its porous cells into the nerves and bones where our reckless and pathetic ancestors carry on.

  The Silver Age

  There once was an old man in a wheelchair whose voice was barely audible.

  She was a stranger, someone visiting someone else, who stopped by his room when she learned he was a priest.

  But I’m not, he said.

  Outside his ward about thirty other rotting patients were locked into their wheelchairs.

  The nurse murmured to the man:

  “I told that gal good-bye. You’re too tired.”

  He thought she asked: How did the gods die? Where are they buried?

  He followed the sun’s rays across a smoky windowpane and saw the sky yellowing.

  “Father? Can I speak to you?”

  Now he shivered on a slab and was told by a male nurse that he had an hour before the operation.

  “You will be wheeled into pre-op, where you will return after surgery, and you will see nurses looking you in the face. You will be given warm blankets and patted.

  “Ice chips, dry lips, you’ll get the shivers. Then they will put the mask over your face, and you will be gone for a long period of time until the slow return to the same room.

  “You will be there for hours, Father, half here, half gone, and wanting to be all gone. The dementia that is descending now is of a local kind.”

  But I’m not!

  You will be inserted into measures of time that flip before you like postcards.

  Paisleys and parsley, a horse’s profile, an Irish setter, a mansion among trees.

  Each the product of a particular mind.

  “You will visit all of these holy outposts: Kurdistan, Uzbekistan, Moscow, Cork, Greece, and the film societies again, London, fishing. I see you live at a monastery in Upstate New York.

  “A stranger in black will ask you to swallow the wafer and say the Lord’s Prayer with him.

  You will do it twice and refuse it the last time. And then you will die.”

  Each way he turned he saw a cadre of young nurses who looked alike, with recessive chins, thick stomachs, black hair pulled back, sullen chattering faces.

  That night he went insane ripping off all his nightclothes, pulling out tubes, because the night nurse was unpleasant about taking him to the bathroom.

  She sighed with boredom as she put the tubes and liquids back into his skin and rolled up the damp sheets.

  A sedation holiday was out of the question. The drip was in again.

  He pissed into the sheets to let his loathing for her go again.

  And then, in a low baritone, almost inaudibly, he sang songs by the great Marvin Gaye, “Mercy Mercy Me” was one, a song he would sing when raking the red leaves of fall.

  His name is I. F. Annensky. His Russian émigré parents were scholars and poets, so he was named after the poet Innokenty Annensky, “the last of Tsarskoe Selo’s swans” who wrote a poem beloved by Russians though impossible to understand:

  Among the worlds, the sparkling spheres,

  The name of One Star only I repeat …

  It’s not because I love Her alot

  But just because I pine with others.

  And when by doubt I’m troubled

  I pray to Her alone for answers.

  It’s not because She gives off light,

  But just because with Her I don’t need light.

  Star in Russian is feminine.

  This was the only translation he knew of the poem and he knew it by heart, even though it threw him into a fury.

  The translation was terrible! As bad as the subtitles of Russian films, by Tarkovsky, and even

  The Idiot. Didn’t anybody care?

  He wanted to forget the poem, fast. Bad, bad. There must be another way.

  Why did his brain remember such a piece of shit?

  Maybe the worse the translation, the better it is!

  Closer to the original, in its fomenting stages, before it became hardened into good common sense.

  The translation might be the sphota version, it has caught the first mental vibrations of a verse in its latency.

  In the past, literature has given him a second layer of skin where words were printed in the shadows of his body hair. The words fluttered in the slightest wind or pressure.

  “Always dwelling within all beings is the Atman, the Purusha, the Self, a little flame in the heart. Know this pure immortal light; know this pure immortal light.”

  (The Upanishads)

  This body-skin is luminous, not physical, just beyond, a whorl of wonder scarred by experience but still aglow.

  If he had written a book and someone else had eaten it, he would find it oozed with liquids between the layers of printed paper. Alphabet light!

  His last wish was to melt into God. But just as he had absorbed its sweetness into his entire physical system, then he was mauled by machines.

  The plastic tubes got caught in the sleeves or jammed inside his johnnie, bells jingled, heads went down inserting sharp needles into the skin of his stomach which was by then a visual graphic design implanted in stripes all over his belly.

  He had become an instrument panel, a dashboard on a plane. He was rolled up, thrown down, turned over, pricked, and asked several times:

  “Do you live alone?”

  Alone? Not when in lilacs … and when I move the young calves down to the lower pasture by scattering meal for them so they follow me. I am in charge of the monastery farm.

  All he could see were stars in the basin of his brain.

  Now he perceived, with all the dripping blood and blinking screens, the cures and diagnoses and analyses, that humans had cultivated certain diseases as a way of preparing for the cures awaiting them.

  This meant diseases had become necessities to human beings. Children at play were labeled by psychologists so the children could be identified and studied like vermin and monkeys. This was the message of the developed world and a sign of its dying.

  Because the cure had begun to produce the disease, collaborate with it, both ways, the development of mankind was over.

  In Europa ’51, Ingrid Bergman passes through the world, changing from a selfish socialite into a saint, but only through the wildest torments, and in the end, where is she taken, where is she put? Where else could it be but into a mental hospital with charts and white coats and labor
atories?

  This is the way the world ends: in psychoanalysis.

  It was like that bad translation!

  One thing surrounds you in parts, drops of sunshine, or shadows, and these vaporous gods live on after you are gone.

  But wait. Where have I seen that woman’s face before? Why did she pause at the door as if she knew me?

  She is folded in smoke from the crematorium over the hills there.

  She is like a shadow shaped like a hound sleeping on the floor nearby.

  “What month is it?”

  Winter.

  “No. April.”

  “The trick is to follow the clue, to see the chance connection, attend to it, and against all reason, follow it to the next clue, or coincidence, yes, if the reading at Mass echoes what you were thinking about in the night, follow that message out into the streets, and the next, follow the coincidences.”

  Once he trailed some blobs of ultraviolet light on the pavement in Washington, all the way out to Catholic University and back on the bus with the poorest of the poor.

  If only the rooftop would shine again with the soft fallen snow-flakes too large to last. Each one like a white film, so ethereal it helped him go dark.

  It is the one who has no light but is light who is needed. Or was it she who staved off his fear of darkness … she who? He would have to look again.

  “I can get you a butterscotch candy in the Gift Shop.

  But tell me—Do you live alone?”

  Do I—?

  “Well, I mean, you are badly injured, missing a leg, a kidney …”

  “I saw a nail bomb once. This one was inside a pressure cooker. A black cauldron. Horrible, Father.”

  Another nauseatingly bad translation of a quatrain by Annensky beat at his brain. It’s like the music that precedes vomit.

  Just to see this all, while fully freezing …

  How strangely new is this air cold …

  Do you know, I thought, more dizzying

  Is to see the empty deeps of words.

  He translated it over with his eyes squeezed closed and tears peeping through.

  How awful to see all of this while I am freezing.

  The air is strangely new and cold.

  But even more dizzying and peculiar is this:

  I see how deep and empty words are.

  “To whom should I pray, Father?” another patient asks.

  Pray to that woman over there.

  “Your faithful visitor?”

  Pray to her for help because nobody loved her.

  The Child’s Child

  Once upon a time there was a girl who was first a piece of wood, a fish, an embryo, a beast, a sky rocket, a pagan, then a slave; but then in retrospect she was called a saint and she hated that. She stayed animal but her function in the imagination of the world changed. She was born on a rise in time facing two ways.

  Her mother was her father’s concubine, he a bullying Celt who may have also been Lusitanian.

  The child’s mother could have been one of the many slaves dragged across seas, smacked and bullied and sent out on dangerous missions in her sleep. When she mentioned the thoughts and dreams that came to her at night, her husband demanded he hear them. And then he put her visions to work for himself, basing his strategies on her surmising.

  However, as is usual, he wearied of her body and sent her away to die, which she did. For the daughter, it was an outrage and a misery that her mother went ahead without her, and she became as difficult to manage as Edith Stein, Helen Keller, and many children who rebelled early. She ran away and thrashed when caught, slapped and bit and squirmed and shouted. She vomited on her father’s hands when he twisted them around her wrists, and finally she was sent away to foster care as so many children are.

  Her foster parents were poor but happy to get a little help caring for the naughty child. They were permissive, giving her freedom and hunks of bread at the same time. She had her first taste of butter there and it fast became a pleasure, an addiction.

  This girl, who still carried her pagan and animal ways in her, played in the hills and valleys and by the river that cut and paused as a basin of green scum and water lilies. There were enormous rock outcroppings where she could hide and preserve her findings. There were fresh oak trees and fields green from a soft eternal rain, where cows chewed and the lambs rolled.

  She constructed bridges across the trickling streams and built model stone houses for her sticks to live in. As she grew older, she braided reeds into baskets and found a long thread that would circle the world. She tightened and picked at it and made the lamb’s wool sing.

  When she warbled, the moon wobbled. When she wandered out of range of the human, knowing that the social world was a menacing one, she went into hiding.

  Her first dwelling was made of roots that rotted in the rain.

  Her second was made of turf and manure, but these two sank with damp into stink holes. Like Prince Myshkin, she herself was more God than Christ. People hated her when she was away, then taunted her on her return for she showed mercy to all.

  Always fleeing humans, she made another house with help this time from child virgins. They loved donkeys and ate like Jesus, meatless, not wanting the smell of venison in their veins. They sprinkled flowers on their grain. Two muleloads of firewood and turf were brought to their house daily.

  The girl grew to be leader of her gang of disaffected teens in years to come. Sometimes they were so hungry they had to eat their cotton clothes soaked in salted water and boiled for hours. Bluebells, bees, and violets thrived under their care, and flourished free of feet stepping on them. The gang was like a flock of Buddhist monks trained to tread lightly. The girl had a cloak that she never ate a bit of. She whirled it around her body like a Sufi and understood the nature of time this way.

  Yes, she wore a whirling spiral, neither going forward nor backward, but when she turned, she shot past north, west, south, east until the cloak dropped at her feet. When and where it dropped became a lesson in acquiescence.

  We are all bound together in a tapestry that like the sea gives the impression of movement toward something but is actually just a maternal body of material.

  The binder for liquid bole is animal-skin glue. Almost honey. Without glue binder, bole won’t stick to the icon board. And then there is the gold leaf, or flake, like a dry fleck of pollen, to gild the wood. Everything is stuck together when the gold has come.

  The flowers buzz when the vibration of the bees stimulates their pistons and their molecules swell and their petals hum like cellos. Rocks are alive too, the firstborn of the natural world, somber without will.

  There is no freedom from this universe we were born into, because it is our vague source of sensation, our soul, the container of our guilt.

  Skins liquefy in heat. And when a bald baby swallow dies on your palm, you feel warmth pouring over your skin, a kind of burning fountain that scalds you like pepper spray.

  Do you think this is a sign of the spirit ripping its energy into you to carry to the other side? I do. There are no actual objects over there, no materials but unformed steaming clouds, colors that harmonize musically, no gravity exists but elasticity composed of invisible mesh images.

  Who will meet me on the other side, I ask you, to prove the error of what I say? Will it be someone who never loved me?

  A certain tree is like a spider’s web cut like scratches by a diabolic force, a hedge full of midges and dung beetles. These are the balancers of the natural world; they take the edge off joy.

  The teen never told a child there is no God and never told God that a child should go to jail. She stuck her finger in a lake and made a well. As a rivulet she spouted among candy wrappers by the side of a road to Limerick. She could tell a rook from a blackbird.

  Remember the poor, she said, but only those who had been poor knew who the poor really were or how common. Most were too middling and self-protected to remember their nothingness. It takes seven generations
to get rid of the influence of an ancestor, but seven generations from which one?

  Poverty is a condition that can be entered into voluntarily, but the multitudes of people are like the children of Hamelin following strangers who wear bright colors and whose voices are sweet. Pray all you like to St. Bridget of Sweden, who gave birth to eight children and is known as the patron saint of failure.

  Everything she tried went wrong. This is why we love her: she knows how it feels to fail. She pities the poor immigrants streaming across the earth and has a place in her heart for those with Etruscan features: the boys wide-eyed, with black eyebrows and curly locks who were capable of awful damage. Epigenetics might finally trace our actions to our traumatized and brutish ancestors. They are like hornets of the bloodstream. But the boys in the icons are girls with black curls, beautiful.

  The gods moved into the animals’ abodes and the animals became the forms of an ancient belief system, and the relics of their bodies were held up to the light and painted as outlines in dark caves.