The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Read online

  Or is beauty itself an intricately fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all? There is a certain fragment of an ancient and involved Inuit tale I read in Farley Mowat that for years has risen, unbidden, in my mind. The fragment is a short scenario observing all the classical unities, simple and cruel, and performed by the light of a soapstone seal-oil lamp.

  A young man in a strange land falls in love with a young woman and takes her to wife in her mother’s tent. By day the two women chew skins and boil meat while the young man hunts. But the old crone is jealous; she wants the boy. Calling her daughter to her one day, she offers to braid her hair; the girl sits pleased, proud, and is soon strangled by her own hair. One thing Inuit know is skinning. The mother takes her curved hand knife shaped like a dancing skirt, skins her daughter’s beautiful face, and presses that empty flap smooth on her own skull. When the boy returns that night he lies with her, in that tent at the top of the world. He is wet from hunting, however, and soon the skin mask shrinks and slides, uncovering the shriveled face of the old mother. The boy flees in horror, forever.

  Could it be that if I climbed the dome of heaven and scrabbled and clutched at the beautiful cloth till I loaded my fist with a wrinkle to pull, that the mask would rip away to reveal a toothless old crone, eyes glazed with delight?

  A wind rose, quickening; it invaded my nostrils, vibrated my gut. I stirred and lifted my head. No, I’ve gone through this a million times, beauty is not a hoax—how many days have I learned not to stare at the back of my hand when I could look out at the creek? Come on, I say to the creek, surprise me; and it does, with each new drop. Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it. Waste and extravagance go tougher up and down the banks, all along the intricate fringe of spirit’s free incursions into time. On either side of me the creek snared and kept the sky’s distant lights, shaped them into shifting substance and bore them speckled down.

  This Tinker Creek! It was low today, and clear. On the still side of the island the water held pellucid as a pane, a gloss on runes of sandstone, shale, and silt. The fast side showed flecks of shadow and tatters of sky. There are the waters of beauty and mystery, issuing from a gap in the granite world; they fill the lodes in my cells with a light like petaled water, and they churn in my lungs mighty and frigid, like a big ship’s screw. And these are also the waters of separation. They purify, acrid and laving, and they cut me off. I am spattered with a sop of ashes, burnt bone knobs, and blood; I range wild-eyed, flying over fields and plundering the woods, no longer quite fit for company.

  In the old Hebrew ordinance for the waters of separation, the priest must find a red heifer, a red heifer unblemished, which has never known the yoke, and lead her outside the people’s camp, and sacrifice her, burn her wholly, without looking away: “Burn the heifer in his sight; her skin, and her flesh, and her blood, with her dung, shall he burn.” Into the stinking flame the priest casts the wood of a cedar tree for longevity, hyssop for purgation, and a scarlet thread for a vein of living blood. It is from these innocent ashes that the waters of separation are made, anew each time, by steeping them in a vessel with fresh running water. This special water purifies. A man—any man—dips a sprig of hyssop into the vessel and sprinkles—merely sprinkles!—the water upon the unclean, “upon him that touched a bone, or one slain, or one dead.” So. But I never signed up for this role. The bone touched me.

  I stood, alone, and the world swayed. I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs. Isak Dinesen in Kenya, her heart utterly broken by loss, stepped out of the house at sunrise, seeking a sign. She saw a rooster lunge and rip a chameleon’s tongue from its root in the throat and gobble it down. And then Isak Dinesen had to pick up a stone and smash the chameleon. But I had seen that sign—what she saw, that is, the world’s cruelty—more times than I had ever sought it. Then today I saw an inspiriting thing, a pretty thing, really, and small.

  I was standing lost, sunk, my hands in my pockets, gazing toward Tinker Mountain and feeling the earth reel down. All at once I saw what looked like a Martian spaceship whirling toward me in the air. It flashed borrowed light like a propeller. Its forward motion greatly outran its fall. As I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovered pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally came to rest. I found it in the grass; it was a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair. Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose—not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world’s rondure where they must—but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down. O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, oh welcome, cheers.

  The bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish as of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes I will think, two maple keys. And if I am a single maple key falling, at least I can twirl.

  Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

  Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery.

  Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the solid, turn, and unlock—more than a maple—a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

  I live in tranquility and trembling. Sometimes I dream. I am interested in Alice mainly when she eats the cookie that makes her smaller. I would pare myself or be pared that I, too, might pass through the merest crack, a gap I know is there in the sky. I am looking just now for the cookie. Sometimes I open, pried like a fruit. Or I am porous as old bone, or translucent, a tinted condensation of the air like a watercolor wash, and I gaze around me in bewilderment, fancying I cast no shadow. Sometimes I ride a bucking faith while one hand grips and the other flails the air, and like any daredevil I gouge with my heels for blood, for a wilder ride, for more.

  There is not a guarantee in the world. Oh your needs are guaranteed; your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. If you can catch it it will catch you up, aloft, up to any gap at all, and you’ll come back, for you always come back, transformed in a way you may not have bargained for—dribbling
and crazed.

  The waters of separation, however lightly sprinkled, leave indelible stains. Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Did you think you would keep your life, or anything else you love? But no, your needs are all met. Just not as the world giveth. You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that the outrageous guarantee holds. You see creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone. You have finally understood that you’re dealing with a maniac.

  I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn, incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.

  TSUNAMI

  ON APRIL 30, 1991—on that one day—138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner that night I brought it up. My daughter was seven years old.

  I said it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.

  “No, it’s easy,” my daughter said. “Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.”

  She was young. The tsunami victims in Bangladesh, and later, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, in Japan, they weren’t dots. They were beloved daughters, beloved sons. Partners in love, fathers and mothers. Every adult knows this.

  It’s been a stunning time for us adults. It always is. Nothing is new, but it’s fresh for every new crop of people. What is eternally fresh is our grief. What is eternally fresh is our astonishment. What is eternally fresh is our question: What the Sam Hill is going on here?

  Is anyone running this show? Is some Fate carefully placing earthquakes on our one planet? Does an intelligence fix the height, speed, and angle of waves? Does Omnipotence hurl hurricanes, point tornadoes, plant plagues? We could not find anyone to make a credible case for any of these brain-snarling positions.

  After all, we in the West hold the individual precious. Do we not? Or does an individual’s value weaken with the square of the distance, like the force of gravity?

  We eat at restaurants while people weaken and starve everywhere, sons or daughters all. We vote as equal persons. Some monks train themselves out of bias for family members. Monks don’t have children. You and I, then, are just two of seven-plus billion people of supreme significance. “Head-Spinning Numbers Cause Minds to Go Slack,” read one newspaper headline. Surely we agree that our minds must not go slack.

  A British journalist, observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, reasoned: “Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.” For “sacred” substitute “of great value” or whatever you want, and look for flaws in his logic. He meant, of course, human life.

  We who breathe air now will join the vast layers of those who breathed air once. We arise from dirt and dwindle to dirt, and the might of the universe is arrayed against us.

  FOR THE TIME BEING

  FOOTPRINTS

  ON THE DRY LAETOLI PLAIN OF NORTHERN TANZANIA, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints. The two barefoot prehumans walked closely together. They walked on moist volcanic tuff. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.75 million years ago—before hominids chipped stone tools. Ash covered the footprints and hardened like cement. Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the two who walked; it was a rainy day. We have almost ninety feet of their steady footprints intact. We do not know where they were going or why. We do not know why one of them paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. “A remote ancestor,” Leakey guessed, “experienced a moment of doubt.” We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these two barefoot ones did.

  After archaeologists studied this long strip of record for several years, they buried it again to save it. Along one preserved portion, however, new tree roots are already cracking the footprints, and in another place winds threaten to sand them flat; the preservers did not cover them deeply enough. Now they are burying them again.

  Giacometti said, “The more I work, the more I see things differently; that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”

  FOR THE TIME BEING

  JUNE 1923: The French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin was traveling on muleback in the vastness beyond the Great Wall, west of what was then called Peking. He saw from the mule what he had often seen in Egypt years before: “the burnt stones of the desert and the sand of the dunes in the dusk.” This was the Ordos, the Inner Mongolian Desert.

  The Ordos is a desert plateau—3,000 feet high, spreading 35,000 square miles—from which mountains rise. The Great Wall separates the Ordos from the fertile lands to the east and south in Shansi and Shensi Provinces.

  He was forty-two years old, tall and narrow, fine-featured. He wore a big felt hat like a cowboy and heavy boots. Rough weather had cut lines on his face. He had carried stretchers during World War I for a regiment of sharpshooters. His courage at the front—at Ypres, Arras, and Verdun—won him several medals which the surviving men of his regiment requested for him. One of his fellows recalled his “absolute contempt for danger” as he mounted parapets under fire. They shortened his name—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—to simply Teilhard, “Tay-YAR,” as it’s pronounced in French.

  His characteristic expression was simple and natural, according to one scientist, who also noted that his eyes were “filled with intelligence and understanding.” Another colleague described him as “a man of self-effacing and irresistible distinction, as simple in his gestures as in his manners. . . . His smile never quite turned to laughter. . . . Anxious to welcome, but like a rock of marble.” From the back of a jog-trotting mule, he could spot on stony ground a tiny rock that early man had chipped.

  On some days in the Ordos, he and his geologist partner dug, excavated, and sifted the ground. On other days they moved in caravan. They rode with two Mongolian soldiers—to fight bandits—and five so-called donkey boys. “On the third day,” he wrote a friend, “we arrived at an immense steppe over which we traveled for more than six days without seeing much else but endless expanses of tall grasses.” He passed the garnet and marble gorges of the Ula-Shan, “the old crystalline shelf of China.”

  July 1923: Teilhard was one of the men who unpacked the expedition’s three donkeys and ten mules for the night. Bandit raids had routed them from the steppes and forced them to enter the badlands. That night he and the others pitched their two white tents in the Ordos massif, within a circle of red earth cliffs. In one red cliff he found, by daylight, the fossil remains of extinct pachyderms from the Pliocene.

  “The immense hazard and the immense blindness of the world,” he wrote, “are only an illusion.”

  The scant rain that reaches the Ordos falls in thunderstorms. During one storm, Teilhard wrote a letter. “Of this part of the journey, the crossing of the Arbous-Ula will remain in my memory as the finest stage. The innumerable strata of this savage mountain, a forward bastion of the Ula-Shan on the right bank of the Yellow River, end gently into two long concentric folds which seem to unfurl over the eastern solitudes.”

  August 1923: Once more they pitched their tents in the desert, in a circle of cliffs. They camped for a month, in the southeast corner of the Ordos, where the cliffs were gray, ye
llow, and green. Here the great eroded loess hills met the sands laid by the river called Shara-Osso-Gol. And here they found the world’s first evidence of pre-Neanderthal man in China. (People lived in China long before Neanderthals lived in Europe.) The man of the yellow earths, Teilhard named him, for loess is fine yellow dust. They found his traces in the Shara-Osso-Gol’s twisted canyon.

  First they struck Neanderthal tools ten meters down: scrapers, gravers, quartzite blades. Then they dug through sixty-four feet of sand before they revealed an ancient hearth where Paleolithic people cooked. Their blackened hearth near the river made a thin layer among cross-bedded dune sands and blue clays. No hominid bones were there, but some tools lay about, and the hearth was indisputable—the first trace of human life north of the Himalayas.

  The people who made these fires by this river about 450,000 years ago, before the last two ice ages, were not Homo sapiens. They were Homo erectus, or Peking Man. During their time, the Outer Mongolian plateau to the north continued its slow rise, blocking Indian Ocean monsoons; the northern plateau dried to dust and formed the Gobi Desert. The people would have seen dust clouds blow from the north, probably only a few big dust clouds every year. Such dust today! they must have thought. After the people vanished, the dust continued to blow across their land; it laid yellow and gray loess deposits hundreds of feet deep. Almost 4,500 centuries passed, and in 1222 Genghis Khan and his hordes rode ponies over the plateau, over these hundreds of feet of packed loess, over the fecund dust and barren sand, over the animal bones, the chipped blades, and the hearth. Teilhard thought of this, of Genghis Khan and the ponies. “Much later,” he wrote, “Genghis Khan crossed this plain in all the pride of his victories.” At that time the Mongols made stirrups and horseshoes from wild-sheep horns.