The city of lights
Nathanael and Isabelle, stories inside a dream
Today, on the bus from home to downtown, I saw a woman praying with a rosary of beads. When the ink dries do I have to take the words in? like a foster child? do I have to believe the mother and the father? or can I stay in the state of the holy ghost? "Nathanael, Nathanael, je veux t'enseigner la ferveur" from Les Nourritures Terrestres, by Andre Gide The City ________________________________________________________________________________________ Isabelle said "I have always listened with admiration, if not envy, to the declarations of citizens who tell how they have lived for twenty or thirty years in the same section of town, or even the same house, and who have never been out of their native city. Not to feel the torturing need to know and see for oneself what is there, beyond the mysterious blue wall of the horizon, not to find the arrangements of life monotonous and depressing, to look at the white road leading off into the unknown distance without feeling the imperious necessity of giving in to it and following obediently across mountains and valleys! The cowardly belief that man must stay in one place is too reminiscent of the unquestioning resignation of animals, beasts of burden stupefied by servitude and yet always willing to accept the slipping on of the harness... A nomad I will remain for life in love with distant and unchartered territories” Isabelle Eberhardt - written circa 1900, from "Penciled Notes", in "The Oblivion Seekers", translated by Paul Bowles.
The text starts with Isabelle and I start here. ________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________ Sometimes, when I enter the city of Dhorna at night, I feel an inexplicable fear that this is to be the last time. As if I could only dare, one more time, to imagine such distant travels to a place in memory. There, where I found the meaning, the answer, the irresistible lure of the low mud walls, there where I learned it was not necessary to understand. Where I learned to fish with the men, furled old fishermen with hair very black, their faces deep in lines with the sun, in trade for some kind of sturgeon. The ramp, cement slippery in green algae, the landing place for a long gone ferry. This end of the line, across dirty water… They stopped, stood up from the shallow and stared back at me, then, unconcerned, continued throwing what looked like fish heads on to the baskets. It was there I was given beads of many colors by the women, who trailed in with their bead work and with food for the men, with their strange wrinkled faces and tall blond haloed yellow hair, their ugliness and their calmness. They surrounded me and asked permission if they could try an intricate light beige apron necklace on my body, to see how it would look on their granddaughters. They touched my hair and gently placed it around my neck. It was small for me... but it felt beautiful, and they agreed. ‘and this story still does not want to be written from the riches’ The city of lights had no visible vegetation, the only things I remember were the mud, the mud and the mud. In earlier times, he had told me, “There were lushes and greens. Hibiscus lived next to Baptisia, that false indigo pea like flower, with bluish early blooms cascading down in long arches, heavy in racemes forcing the branches to bend down. The flowers soon gone, replaced by long pods that mimicked the flowers, then turning brown and popping open in seeds that looked like the pods, in late autumn, before the snows."
He had known all about those things, and what to do with the pods. There was plenty of water then, and snow. Something called the seasons and milestones, benchmarks and life transitions...
When is it then that the smell of things becomes less of a trajectory of yeah and nay, less of a pungent, more of a numbing of the olfactory senses? when is it that the lack of smell is the best possible alternative to a preferred smell? and the touch not essential – and the approach, one that is somewhat careful? yet the approach, once it reaches, even now, is an approach to the creation of mud clay circus dark gypsies trapezes puppet clowns dressed for day and undressed and redressed as kings and queens for night. But I never understood his approaches. No clown by day, no trapeze, just this jester flying with no wings. To this day I swear, I will never understand his approaches. To anything! Most of all, not to me. He fashions himself as some sort of a go at it alone type – some kind of shaman - for sure. But those are not his words. His words are words of process, then they are words of deep doubt, and of fear. His words, like mine, are not swords, yet they wound as if they were meant as weapons, in these precise times, as if they were meant as swords. Our conversations are matter or fact, in their beginnings. They then acquire a weight I can only describe as the weight of a crystal. Our conversations pierce through layers and layers of dense material, to me, almost always material I do not “see”, it is material I sense, though, it is material I do not smell. What comes to mind is the material of non-matter, the enchanting chapter on black holes, the anti matter material of all dreams. This material lacks in clarity, yet it is as clear as water in a clear creek of a pristine brook in memory, somewhere – the where I want to go. Where I imagined I wanted to go with him. Now he is no longer available. I left the island and the city of Dhorna without ever seeing him again.
After he/she left too, and for many years there after she felt the world was no longer infinite she lost her sheen her words, they too, no longer spread like seeds in bloom
Within so many counted words, a contained reservoir, they would end soon, if she was not careful, she ought not to squander them. And repetition then, became necessary, during that time, she told stories over, and over again, in the dry telling days, the days of no water.
Her words still came from her vast, yet contained repertoire and she felt compelled to repeat sentences. Sentences like “when in the full dark green of summer”, or when “the light was still catching”, she repeated the best words, as if they were finite and her world, a world that was ending forever. Sometimes the people in the village took her words and made necklaces out of them. Beaded necklaces, and their beaded wood recited the words, the words of repetition from her finite repertoire. They would add some of their words, from their own finite repertoires and they would recite the words over, and over again, while they let the beads, methodically, slowly fill in the spaces between the beads, and tell the rest of the stories that were embedded in the telling.
Praying, wishing for him to appear, like a child sometimes wishes for magic to happen, from the clear like almost crystal, but more like the silk weaving from the spiders, out from under the bed with the monsters, out with it! – that kind of magic that opens the door to the closets, the lock made out of rusty iron and bronze, and on to the lid to the treasures and the semi precious stones in agate and emeralds, pirates and Hungarian relatives, gypsies green with envy and early jade - true clear crystals and mirrors, full jewels in memory! Easy dawns and sunsets revealed in jolts and in understandings. As I waited, I wandered toward the mountain path, not far from where I always stayed, when I returned, down by the docks. I walked toward the mountain path… ... When I met them, I was not prepared. They were singing the children they weaved around us like transparent structures, like the in between in the weave of rich textile sometimes, like ghosts in a grassy green park, dancing prancing swinging when I remember them, they look to me like raised weave. I can touch them, lightly, what they look like brown beige blond, almost black blue yellow wool garrulous in the weaving is the word I am looking for – that is the word that describes them…
1 The City of Lights started a few years before 2007, when I got lost crossing the Tappen Zee bridge, on the way back home, from an all women writer’s guild conference at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York. It was twilight, and in the distance there was the glow of perfect soft luminous light beaming across the horizon. That was my imaginal City of Lights!
I was lost in a land I recognized and feared - the approach to the City - and so, in high anxiety and deep curiosity I drove down an imaginary lane, surrounded by astoundingly rich mansions and gardens, to find ways to return to the New Jersey Turnpike and to the safety of home. Turns, signs, traffic and all of a sudden, I was crossing back up on the spiral highway of what appeared to me to be the Brooklyn Bridge. Brass bed stands abandoned, a mattress, large bits and pieces of garbage, carcasses, beheaded dolls, plastic toys. Fear I could be trapped there forever, such a threatening and marvelous place - the discarded promises of what was there, down below - that huge city running on lights and on possible life rebellion and sin, I realized, much later!
The city of Dhorna came to me in a dream, vivid, that night, and the inhabitants never left. I drew many maps of the island, the mountain path, researched the name and wanted to know what it all meant.
It goes through many versions, over the years, none very different, all powerful and full of insight. Still difficult to bring them to the printed/seen/heard/tasted world of others.
“Praying, wishing for him to appear, like a child sometimes wishes for magic to happen”
And like me, as an adult wishing for him, god to appear, for my communion with the eagle, for the sacred plant to bring me my angel mate, for magic to happen, for peace, for the state of love to take over?…
I love my Isabelle Eberhardt quote from the early 19 hundreds and I also marvel at the powerful, sometimes incredible shifts and changes in me, since then!
knowing less and less… learning more and more to be in love with life, even as stationary as my life becomes…
Fun to check out Atlas Obscura for more about the cross dressed heir who, at 22, around 1900, left her Switzerland home to roam Algeria and join a mystical Muslim Sufi sect. Not all accounts about her life are like this one and many seem a bit controversial to me, as if they were written by people who did not love her. A puzzle in the making.
I loved that last bit, the less and learning of stillness. I loved every minute lost in those words.
Wow! This might be my new favorite.