It’s possible those names were also in some way
provisional, unless the lake has a name for itself.
Facing it, it’s feasible to believe that the lake really does
have a name, one it has given to itself and that it keeps. It
keeps things. My friend, kneeling on the sand, arranged
stones in a circle while she told me about the dreams she
has had to commemorate her dead. The lake has eaten
the stones.
I went in to the church, which is close to the lake. I like
the melancholy of churches. The minister, breaking the
bread, wears a small smile that suggests he knows the
futility of what he does, and does it anyway, from love,
from habit, from the way the two become, over time,
indistinguishable from one another.
I love because I have grown the habit of love, I cannot
love all at once, by choice, it happens gradually, like water
overtaking the shore. It happens slowly, without noticing,
and the shoreline has altered. It is not willed. I suppose
that is what this man might mean by grace.
I am ambivalent about churches. I would rather
ambivalence than certainty, I will live and die in
ambivalence, which is a pretty meager supper, perhaps an
excuse for evading the problem of evil, or the other
problem, of good, by not quite believing in either. By not
quite believing. By longing for belief.
At eighteen I walked out of a church in another country
and came out into the square and there was a group of
boys playing soccer and I knew that God was real in the
blunt humiliation of that statement.
But then my life went on as before and God was just
another metaphor.
And maybe God was only present because I was a tourist,
thinking the boys and the paving stones placed there so
that I might find them and be transfigured, and they
themselves remain luminously flat, without fault or flaw,
without meaning except for mine.
As a child, my father heard a sermon in which the
minister told the congregation that they must pray
unceasingly. He was a serious child, with no mother, not
because his mother was dead but because she had left,
not because she had left but because she was sent away by
his father. Boys belong to fathers.
She was returned to the country where she was born. She
was not permitted to say goodbye. He came home. His
mother was not there.
The few times I met her, she was like a moth at a light
bulb, buffeting against him, not knowing what to do with
the intervening time, that he was a man now, that she was
old.
My father snuck back into the church later on to begin
his career as an unceasing prayer. He knelt, intending to
praise forever, assuming that is what prayer is, to praise
and to plead.
Someone came in. Embarrassed, he lay on the floor and
hid.
Call: O Lord hear our prayer
Response: And may our cry come unto thee
When I think of God, I think of hiding. The way a child
hides. In hope of being found.
This church is nearly empty. There is a table in the aisle
and a tray of small stones. We are asked to remember our
dead by dropping the stones into a dish of water. I hold
mine until the stones are warmed. They darken as they
sink.
On Ash Wednesday, which is the first day of Lent, the
priest marks the forehead of the believer with ash.
Formerly, it was only women who had their foreheads
marked, while the men had ash scattered over their hair,
which must have looked like billows of smoke from a
small fire. Women covered their heads in church. The
priest says Remember you are dust and to dust you shall
return, a modern formulation replacing Remember, man,
that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return, spoken to
Adam and Eve in the garden, before they were turned
out of the gates and had to start walking.
What you are, we were. What we are, you will be.
A friend is fretting over her father’s books. Her father
must move to a retirement home. He fled the Iranian
revolution along with his wife and daughters when the
woman was a child; she has never returned, though she
knows that the house of her earliest memory is still
standing, uninhabited, an orphan in a street where every
other house has been replaced by concrete slabs of
apartment blocks. Her father, who was a civil servant and
then a security guard, has read devotedly all his life.
His books number in the thousands. Eighteenth
century love poetry, illegally distributed Marxist theory,
which he collected at enormous risk to himself and his
family, books of history and philosophy. I don’t even read Farsi
anymore, not really, not at that level, the woman says, and
who will want these books, who will read them now?
The woman and I smile at each other bleakly. To preserve
the past, you would need to let it crush you. You would
need to be nothing except a receptacle for memory, as
though you were a glass case. We keep smiling. Decent,
conscientious. Not willing to be obliterated.
I read a story about Bristlecone pines, a tree that grows
along arid mountain ridges. These trees can live to be
5,000 years old. They are squat, twisted. Survivors, not
conquerors. They are as secret as the name of the lake.
In 1967, a graduate student in Arizona wished to cut down
what he believed to be the oldest specimen of this
tree. He summoned a forester. The man laid his hand on
the trunk and turned to the student and said I will not
touch this tree. Then he left.
The young man found another forester, who cut down
the tree for him.
This is a story of useless sanctity. The first forester could
not save the tree. But I hope it can stand as an epitaph.
That he refused. I think there would be no better way to
be remembered. To have said I will not touch this tree. To
have left.
If the world were a way out? A river? A door? If this was
not a rhetorical question?
I first became aware of the work of Expressionist painter
Charlotte Salomon because of a
series of panels painted on cardboard squares torn from
grocery delivery boxes and arranged along one wall of a
barn in Vermont. The series is entitled Let Us Praise The
Wondrous Life of Charlotte Salomon and is painted in the
style of medieval religious
paintings and also in the style of the subject and also in
the style of the old man who painted them, who lives
near the barn.
He makes, among other things, cardboard testaments to
things that might be praised, or marked, or just
remembered for a while.
Not permanently. Just for a while.
The barn is very dry. One spark, and it would go. This
does not trouble him. Let it burn, he said. The burdens of
history are already over-plentiful. Let something exist for a
while, and then burn, and be forgotten, and make room.
Having spent time with this man, I believe he is not
lying. He does not wish to inflict a permanent mark on
the world. He is reconciled with being. He is in being.
Not guarded against the spark. He has laid himself down.
Just before Charlotte Salomon, five months pregnant,
was gassed at Auschwitz, a witness claims she saw the sky
and cried out God my God, how beautiful it is!
The circumstances of this statement make me wary of
ascribing meaning.
And yet. And yet.
A talismanic hope that it might be possible to notice that
the sky is still there?
Something that means we are praise.
God my God, how beautiful it is.
-- Kate Cayley, Canadian poet and playwright, Mitchell Prize winner for 2021, from Image Journal
