april, or the dangers of crepusculophilia

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim is my homeboy.  You might know him as Paracelsus, so self-styled to indicate that he was taking medicine beyond the learning of the 1^st-century doctor Celsus, and by the sixteenth century, it was about time someone did. In order to do so, though, in order to break the choke hold of ancient-world science on Renaissance heads, Paracelsus had to bear the mockery, enmity, spite, and threats of the established order, the European citadel of authorized knowledge found in the universities of the time. Although he himself had magnificent education by anyone’s standards, he spent very little time within the academic ivory tower, preferring to wander internationally in search of marginalized books and knowledge. One of my favorite quotations comes from him:

Not all things the learned person must know are taught in the academies. Now and then [s]he must turn to old women, to tartars who are called gypsies, to itinerant magicians, to elderly country folk and many others who are frequently held in contempt. From them [s]he will gather his knowledge since these people have more understanding than all the high colleges.

This is great advice, and I’d be eager to chat up “itinerant magicians” and gypsies, but how often does one run into them? In my travels, I have only encountered gypsies once (I think), and unfortunately I cannot remember too much of the conversation I had with them. It was near the famed Rialto Bridge in Venice. I was twenty-one, Nick’s age, and being drunk and upset with a gondolier possessed of wandering hands, I had lost my friends for the evening, and found myself wandering, alone, at midnight, with nowhere to stay.  This situation was entirely desirable to me; I took it in my head to get out of the early spring rain and sleep under a bridge.  The streets were nearly empty.  A man had been following me muttering suggestions in Italian for a while, and every time I turned to confront him, he turned around as though he would walk away.  Then he’d follow me some more.  Finally, sure I could best him if it came to a fight, I kicked him in the ass as hard as I could and that time he kept walking in the other direction for real.  It was 1990, and for some reason, I was convinced that I had AIDS, that the world was about to end in a slow drizzle of nuclear winter, and that I could beat anyone in a fistfight.  None of these things turned out to be true, but I didn’t know it yet.

         The gypsies that I met a few moments later were vehement that I give them money to have my fortune told, and even though I didn’t have much money and we didn’t speak the same language, eventually I agreed.  A few of them pressed on my palms, both palms, and peered with excitement and consternation at the lines there.  They gave me a few sips of the wine that was being passed around.  One woman, maybe about my age, spread out some dog-eared tarot cards on a crate.  It seemed that they were either all talking at once or not talking at all, but it was all the same to me.  I don’t even know what language they were speaking.  I fell asleep hungry, my coat draped over me, and I woke up alone, the gypsies gone.  I guess this anecdote doesn’t necessarily confirm the point Paracelsus was making, since I didn’t gain potent knowledge from those gypsies.  What I gained was a potent memory, under that big bridge with people who themselves seem a bridge between the modern and the old world.  I was at an age, like now, between one life and another.  Bridges make the crossing between one place and another terribly easy, and still, some people get to the middle of the bridge and leap off.  I’m not going to be one of those people.  This summer I am going to turn 42, twice the age I was then.  Coincidentally, this summer I am going to Italy.  I don’t have any money and I can’t afford time off from work, but I’m going anyway because I have to.  I’ve just finished a draft of a novel that takes place in sixteenth-century Naples, and I have to get there.  It’s a dire necessity.

         I thought when I started writing just now that this post would be entitled “Smackademia,” or maybe, “Wackademia”—a complete roast of the present-day American university system that I believed in and labored within for twenty years.  There’s a lot to say on that subject, and maybe I’ll say some of it now, but for the moment, I just feel too happy to be so sour grapes about anything.  Sure, after half a lifetime of study I’m left without a career or a means of keeping myself in the style to which I would like to become accustomed, and the fault is shared between me and a system that is demonstrably fucked up, no doubt, but still, on this morning on the still barren side of spring, I feel happy and don’t want to roast anyone.  The world always seems like it’s about to end, and no doubt it will someday, at least the world we know.  But the other day, Nick and I spotted two bald eagles mating over the Connecticut River, and then the next day, Marisa and I saw a mother fox successfully hunt something fat and furry to bring to her kits.  The world that is passing away has not passed yet, and as we ooze into an uncertain future, we lose nothing of anything that ever was—this is what makes me feel happy even though I don’t know if it’s true—the past and all it possesses belongs to the same body as the future, and it’s impossible for us to ever truly lose anything.

At one time, I dreamed about giving birth to a child.  I favored the name Lola, which was the name of my Irish great-grandmother, Lola Claffey.  I have read that Irish and Scottish names that end in “fey” indicate a family relation to the fairies.  I treasure that association; my own story has some relation to a fairy tale, complete with speaking animals, poor, lovely friends imprinted with perfect gentleness, and the certainty of a happy ending.  There are formulations of fairy stories far older than that particular recipe, however.  One of my graduate students at Queens College wrote her master’s thesis on fairy tales, and we covered much interesting ground together.  “I heard that fairies in the Celtic tradition did not have the benevolent aspect of the ‘fairy godmother’ figure,” she said to me one night.  “I heard they were actually menacing, malicious even.”

         “That’s exactly right,” I was able to affirm.  There’s a tale in the ancient Welsh tradition that tells the story of a young man who whiled his time away at the edge of a lake.  One day, a beautiful lady floats up to him in a boat, offering to take him to a place where age and ache will never bother him.  He had fallen in love, and so, with the urgent voices of his friends behind him, he stepped into her boat and was never seen again.  They lamented his leaving, and they condemned the seductive lady that enticed him out of this world.  And indeed, this world, for all its known evils and familiar devils, is a lovely place, but who can say that when he took that bold step off solid land and into a fairy boat, that long-ago youth wasn’t making the right choice?  At the riverbank, he made a choice, and he left one world for another.  We don’t know how he would tell the story.

         When you’re between one place and another, it’s difficult to tell your story. Where do you start—the middle?  Some people are superstitious about attempting such a thing.  My beautiful butterfly of a friend Zoe, for example, when she was pregnant, “expecting,” as they say, vigilantly refused to talk about her baby for those nine months.  I met her for lunch at Café Colonial one afternoon, and during that conversation I wanted to inquire about baby stuff, the sex, the name, the preparations—topics that I thought were de rigueur when one encountered pregnant friends.  I was thirty-seven, thereabouts, and had managed to remain noticeably un-pregnant, so when it came to what pregnant women want to talk about, I was just guessing.  So many of my pregnant friends, though, had become rather single-minded during this particular nine-month period and beyond.  Not Zoe. It seemed bad luck, she thought, to allot much energy to discussing something so incipient, so not-quite-yet-emergent, as a baby in the womb.  Even to name the thing seems presumptuous on a cosmic scale.  Rather, the chrysalis should be allowed its nonidentity, its not-yet-life in its little sac, and when it comes to be, really passes that threshold from something as interior as a dream into the world of sense and matter, then it can be named, taking its place amongst those of us with basic ontological certitude.  We are.  That sounds like an incomplete sentence but it’s not.  I am, regardless of what precedes ergo.  Zoe’s baby was in between I-will-be and I-am.  Zoe’s baby was not-yet.  Zoe didn’t want to talk about her baby in other sense.

Neither here nor there, I believe, is one way people say that, and that phrase usually has a negative connotation.  The in-between places are wasteland nowheres, and people need to have definite things to say about their lives, their work, their achievements.  It’s uncomfortable, if not infuriating, to try to tell someone about the process of something that isn’t yet, but is in the process of coming to be.  We save these conversations for our intimates, our dear friends, opening up, allowing the yellow light of uncertainty to shine in our eyes, revealing a self that is hesitant, afraid to hope, unwilling to identify with mere possibility, awaiting full fruition.  What kind of story is this?  A dark and dangerous fairy tale.

In his strange and charming book The Celtic Twilight, W.B. Yeats describes walking along the seashore with a girl who claimed she knew the fairies.  Soon, she grew excited to see their fires and hear their music along the shore.  Yeats, too, later claimed that he saw the fairies, heard their music, and—wisely—refused their food, realizing that this ocean-side cave was a threshold into the Otherworld.  In an enlightening moment, he understood how powerful the betwixts and betweens of the Celtic landscape were.  Mists, fogs, dawns, dusks, lakesides, streambeds, dews, bridges, and oceanshores—thresholds all.  These indicate potentiality, the liminal states between one being and another, the possibility of leaving one world and entering a different one.  The magic of the Celtic world, says Yeats, is its twilight, its betweenness.

         There’s danger, too, in twilight.  The young man who left his native shore for an unknown fairy place may indeed have received relief from “age and ache,” but who’s to say whether he ultimately got the better end of the bargain?  Peril lies in any attempt to leave one world for another—witness space shuttle launchings, births, voyages at sea—and there are many fairy stories that describe the misery of those who fall prey to fairy wiles, the madness of being elf-shot, the desolation of never again savoring something as sweet as a fairy feast. What can have created such terror in the folk who perpetuated these stories, and why do fairies range from the whimsical and harmless to the grotesque and horrifying?  In her book At the Bottom of the Garden, Diane Purkiss addresses the conundrum:

A fairy is someone who appears at and governs one of the big crises of mortal life: birth, childhood and its transitions, adolescence, sexual awakening, pregnancy and childbirth, old age, death.  She presides over the borders of our lives, the seams between one phase of life and another. … She is a gatekeeper, and she guards the entrance to a new realm.  Like all gatekeepers, she is Janus-faced, ambiguous: she has a lovely face, a face of promise, and a hideous face, a face of fear.

In the past couple years, I have seen these faces, fairy faces, almost at every turn.  They tantalize me with hope and, often late at night as my neighbors sleep, ravage me with terror. 

I do not think that my circumstances are exceptional since everyone finds themselves at thresholds at many points in their lives, and furthermore, most people are aware of the tremendous significance of such thresholds.  I cannot count how many times I have heard or overheard words signifying something akin to, “There’s a lot of transition in my life right now.”  We know it when we see it. Have you read Rory Stewart’s exceptional book called The Places In Between?  It’s exceptional in part because of its exceptional subject matter.  Stewart, a Scotsman, walked across Afghanistan following the footsteps of Genghis SomeWhatsit, accompanied part of the way by a couple of alien-seeming Afghani soldiers and part of the way by a more familiar-seeming, faithful stray dog.  People should read his book because none of us will ever have a similar experience, and we read of his extraordinary journey with the kind of gaping expression we wear as we observe the Hubble photos of deep space, or read about Shackleton’s voyages, or observe undersea explorations on television.  These are strange places, foreign and marvelous; we are glad to see them, and we may wish for the courage it takes to venture there ourselves, but we are also (we realize) content to be at home enjoying our mediated experience of Afghanistan, the Eagle Nebula, Antarctica, or the Octopus’ Garden.

But there are liminal places closer to home, which doesn’t mean that they are comfortable, familiar places.  Anyone who has been between jobs, in the midst of a health crisis, poised on the brink of divorce can tell you in colorful language exactly how uncomfortable these places are. No one has to wrack their brains to remember an incident that took courage of the truest kind, a personal advancing into the void, whether it was an adventure sought or thrust upon us.  Donating a kidney to a brother; leaving a marriage; bringing a child into the world when one is happy with life as it is.  When Zoe had her baby, she didn’t tell me many details, only that it had been a difficult birth resulting in a little girl named Hero.  Not a common name, but having read Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, I get it.  And I get it in another way, too.  It takes as much of a hero to navigate the birth canal as it does the Suez Canal; just because we’ve all done it doesn’t mitigate the sheer boldness of the effort.  We have all, already, walked between worlds, a genuine shamanic experience. 

My Nick is leaving for Scotland on Tuesday, his first solo adventure into the world.  Perhaps worried about my scanty appetite, he’s made for me a gallon of red sauce and fifty meatballs—one for nearly every day he’s away—as a kind of going away present. I’m driving him to Logan, and at seven pm I’ll kiss him goodbye.  It’s one of those adventures young people have, like the one I had at his age, and I have to say I’m in love with the symmetry of it all.  Nick and I are wondrously compatible, and sometimes I wish he were the man I’d met when I was twenty-one (impossible, I know, because Nick was, um, just being born then...) rather than the one I had met and married.  When I think about my failed marriage, I hover along the edges of regret, so aware of what I’m carrying with me through this transition—baggage, some call it.  What do you pack for these journeys?  What do you bring and what should be left behind?  Nick travels light—I’ve seen his one bag he intends to bring—but he’s so much younger than I am.  I bring everything I can because I think that even the tarnished and old stuff can be restored and made even more useful than it was before. The key to the fairy kingdom must be ancient, passed along from one hand to the next, and I think that somewhere amongst my accumulated stuff that key lies in wait for my discovery. I couldn’t be the happy and whole person I am with Nick without the baggage I’ve brought with me from that marriage.  When Paracelsus mentions learning from people who are “frequently held in contempt,” I think he insinuates we must learn even from those we ourselves hold in contempt.  How rooted, how fixed and stagnant I would be otherwise, if I only learned from those I admire and trust.  If my journey is to continue, if I am to wake up and cross the bridge I’ve been dreaming under, I must make sure that I do not dismiss or lose those lessons I did not seek or want.  Bearing their baggage makes me strong enough to stand on the shore and send my young man off over the waters into the Celtic twilight, his own journey, and to believe that somewhere in his backpack, he carries something from me that will do him good.