Guy Gilsoul
Anne de Bodt by Guy Gilsoul
I. Anne kneeled. Every afternoon, the child would seek the same plot of soft grass, warmed by the summer sun, in the shade of the huge red beech in the family garden. Roses in a line, clusters of blue iris and clipped boxwood hedges gave fragrance to her solitary daydreams. Life slowed down, under the summer garb, drawing countless intertwined threads into seeming immobility. On the surface, the cotton shimmers. The little girl's bright eyes hide a corner of fear like a bee in flower, and her outstretched hands neither pluck nor touch, in a single desire expressed to the fingertips: giving. But the little girl knows, her mouth clamped shut, that she offers only emptiness and with it transparence. Such lightness of being.
How carefree is that apprehension. Could her looks disturb the buttercups and daisies, the scarlet pimpernel and white clover? She only knows that they come with the wind, perhaps from very far away. “If I had wings, if I could fly", she thinks, "I would not injure the earth". She would like to share with ants and butterflies, to follow them in their housework and become their friend. So she seeks her words like a bird seeks twigs, moss, and paper, and barely opens her lips.
What is your name?
This is how friendship always begins. Men from Africa and the Orient, from the North and the Far west have invented thousands of words to discover friendship in the world. And every daybreak brings its share of new words. Words on words from mouth to ear, shifting from instantaneous to durable, along the paths of rivers, oceans and clouds. Words in islands and the tide in phrases, a breathless universe that invented commas, full stops and accents. The voice carried the hand and the hand held a tool that wrote words like dreams on rock and earth. Mankind was gardening.
Men blew on the cinders around the fire of knowledge until it burned to ashes. There was an evening. And a morning. And the blue hour, full of fear, put words in orbit. Words disappeared in smoke. So, to keep the twigs of that walled garden, men burned charcoal, dug holes in the black mountain, mixed oil with crushed ochre, heated the pigments and began to write the wisdom of the blades of grass that the little girl was watching. She watched the pages of her green hideaway.
For a while she dreamt of signs: signs with their noses in the air, swinging head downwards, bumping other signs, tearing the clouds, pricking up their ears. She imagined signs buried in the heart of the iris petals blown off yesterday by a storm. She dreamed of writing signs lined up at random, with pollen ink, on the first muslin of the first page of a book that one day she would give to the plants, the insects, to the tree so close to her.
Petal page, leaf of writing
Anne was smiling. The tree bark thickened from leaves to pages. Words with clear sap, rolled sentences, jointed chapters, inaccessible crowns of sun-red leaves. Anne was so tiny.
She stretched out her hand. The trunk was warm and soft. She caressed it, sliding her fingers over the bumpy surface covering its impatient pages. How many of them described the universe? How many cracks already split the secret of these imprisoned writings and these silent words that here and there sweated a drop of liquid? Exploring the bark territory from East to West, the little girl found the deep black chinks – she could imagine other, large, silent places there. She was so small that in the distraction of a second she disappeared into the heart of the red beech, surrounded by thousands and thousands of rings set out in a precise order to tell the story of years and events. Closed books giving off a golden light, with a patch of morning blue sky. She saw the line of a building, a greenhouse, an arch, a majestic ship, a bird's nest, the head of the Pharaoh of Egypt, the eye in an Etruscan face. Books made streets and cities, walls to keep out the desert, landscapes knotted together with silk thread weaving memories. The tree was a library.
Outside a lightning sparked and thunder crashed. Sitting in her plot of soft grass, Anne jumped, turned her sweet face to the house and to her red beech. It was still there, as soft as the wind. Later, the oak in the evening garden and the San Pablo pine, the trees on Inle lake and the others, the beams holding up the temple at Pattoya-Lakhna, reassured her just the same. But the signal had been given. One day, the words and trees of knowledge might have to change pace. One day, maybe, she would see trees turn to rock, listening on the cliff edge and the hollows of valleys for the echo of ancient chants carved in cuneiform or Chinese ideograms. Let be. Let happen. Talking stones.
The little girl grew to a woman. From the library in her house, she watched one of her sons sitting on a plot of grass. With fear in his eyes he dreamt of flying to keep from injuring the earth.
II. The summer was calling – burned pages and dry rivers left a wake of shadow. The traveler got up early.
No clouds, no tree, the ochre countryside stretched to the horizon. The words wrote of fertile earth projecting black signs outside the margins made to contain them. To other flat surfaces of written pages and parallel lines whose strokes are as scratchy as certainty. Along them glints of the sun slid first subtly, then emphatically, with an unexpected beat, leaving room for handsome silence. A murmur not to be understood and its infinite ramifications.
The hiker heard the echo of his boots on the walk leading to another page, sucking in the air of the first hours of day like the wine at last night's supper. Could he remember the words of the good waitress? Some came back. Others hid in forgetfulness that is never random. He fished for them like for trout, bringing them in wriggling in the net of his inner Mnemosyne, but he knew they were condemned without all the others still hidden.
He just netted one last phoneme, and turned the page to discover a new landscape, as golden, as full of night signs and cut off phrases that he lined up mentally between a cloud and a fragment of a map. The hiker sat down.
He drank and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Already the air was warm, promising a lovely day. In the distance shimmered silvery olive leaves, a copse of cork oak, burned fields black with promise. He had already forgotten the face of the old waitress. There was just a vague shape, not even a colour, a bent silhouette, a flowery apron and a question: "What was she saying?" She spread the table with a white cloth, smooth and worn, patched here and there. She set down the bowl, the glass and the bottle of wine. Then bread, that she cut in front of him, slowly and sharply – a pleasure to watch. She did it while she talked in a soft clear voice that sounded like a prayer.
But what did she say?
No doubt she talked about the weather, the work in the fields, her children – one of them had delicate health – and the dog worn out from oversleeping.
Only snatches came back to him, in pieces like messages intertwined on fragile strips, interrupted to show the limits marked by the final full stop, a pause, a hint of death followed, sometimes, by rebirth of the spirit. Fragile threads, uncertain knots.
The hiker drank another swallow of water. It had the flavour of a mountain spring. He drank again, letting a few drops trickle over his lips and down his neck. Raising his eyes, he saw a twisted tree planted in the middle of nowhere, a spot in the decor, a lucky stopover for the gaze. He stood up and moved toward it, but rather than sitting in its shade, he stopped a few feet away and felt the strength of the branches, the sap inside them and their unquenched desire. Like him, they were hikers. And then, he spotted a little caterpillar crawling along one of them, raising its head from time to time and then continuing on its way. He had always believed in stationary words, frozen by knowledge and subjected to the signs that designate them. But here the little caterpillar, anonymous passenger of a branch and a time it had not chosen, nibbled the edge of its path defying the letters as they appeared. It led to the inner butterfly, still encased and, inching along, took the hiker to the door of the blue and ochre words where only their sonority made sense, like the sound of wings beating. In front of him he no longer saw the fields, pastures and hills, he saw sheets of earth to protect the tired bodies underneath, flying carpets to carry off the birds, prayer rugs to offer the skies.
The hiker left, crossing other texts, bridges and commas and finally stopped on the banks of a smooth lake of icy water that drunk up the sky. He plunged in his hands, making whirlpools that gave off notes of music, in d's and b-flats, do re mi do. From his knapsack he pulled a little box of precious wood holding the caterpillar captive, like Sleeping Beauty. It was as soft as the grass, if a bit frivolous. He chose a surprisingly downy shrub and set the insect on one of the branches, embracing it with a gentle expression that no written word could capture. After wishing it good luck, he watched the little ball stretch out. He could have watched it for hours, sung to it, slept nearby and hoped to find it in the morning at the end of a transparent thread taking it to the ground, but the caterpillar disappeared suddenly in a flash of light. The light was blinding between the branches, excessively white.
The hiker left. Soon he was just a little black spot on a dark mountain. In the sky, a butterfly laughed to see him jumping over crevices on uneven rocks and stones, like the wind winding over the plain... ”. (Hakuin. Zen master).
III. Blown by beating wings, a grain of dust flew through the heady, heavy air, looking for a corner to squat, a crack to bask in the heat of other grains, its companions. It looked for shadow, perhaps an opening, a place with different light.
It had no desire to work the earth, although it liked the earth and simple gestures. It was a comet with no set path, happy at random, rich in being but weightless. Its gentle jumps were more purifying than tiring – across the vacuums that swallowed it up and spat it back. It had given up the mass that gave it status and presence. But if you could look closer, although no one could manage it, you would see how it lacked the slightest muscle; how it was not maintained by any bone. The grain of dust looked more like a black wing, a wind-filled sail than the sun dust that played at catching it and letting it go. A tiny wing with no home port, no talon, a wing that opens, rather than beating, stretching and twisting, bending and coiling drawn out into lines of calligraphy.
That grain could take any shape in an alphabet of its own. But the dust was proud of its destiny. Crawling into the innards, the liver and heart of houses where it felt at home, anxious to know everything about them to be sure not to regret its flight later. Because at one point it would fly away for good and never return, like the fragrance of flowers. It would disappear.
So one morning, it would let itself be carried off, calm, attentive, quiet. If you could move in without touching it, without even creating whiffs and whirlwinds around it, you could follow, and side by side take the invisible path of the gentle slope that gradually moves off the earth. The dust was a half-closed eyelid, a concave mirror whose rays converged to a grain of dust, an infinitely small black dot that it wanted to reach. The dust dove into a pile of dust and looked around. Everywhere translucent walls were seemingly made of fine layers of thin strips, as supple as wings or sheets of paper held together by tiny silken threads which here and there, where it was unexpected, opened in little trembling windows of light. It could see clouds roll by alongside secrets and ancient chants from China and Peru, and petals too, lots of petals.
The grain of dust kept going. At the end of the walls it thought it saw a yellow gate and another blue one just next door. It chose the blue, went on through and was drawn through a larger window. There were one, two, three full white moons and other grey and ink-black planets. There was a beautiful woman, an Egyptian princess, and angel hair with long patient letters and little squares ready to move on. They came white, so white that they that must have been born in shadows. And more windows, some worn to a frazzle, others very narrow. They look more like doors, or cracks in the pale wall peeping on to a tree basking in light. Then there was gold, nothing but gold, swept by the wind and flowers whose transparent petals floated gaily. As it traveled, the grain of dust had thickened its wings with the wealth of a thousand and one sun drops.
A golden grain landed in the heart of a large white flower that grew all over the page.
It had a wing, attached to talon.
IV. There were twelve. Twelve sentinels who shared twelve gates of the earth that an antique law had placed on the continents and the seas before mankind had thought of lighting fire.
The all had the same name, Moment, and could only be told apart by tiny variations in costume due to rain or ice, storms or droughts they had known. Because, before they had found their place, they trekked across the plains and high plateaus, slept in caves and wandered under the stars watching their slow but inevitable metamorphosis. Came the solstice and the equinox, infinitely. And a shared sun and moon, one bright star that the earth swallowed and one pale that in some countries looked like a floating boat.
They had sons and daughters, again more sons and daughters to whom they taught the secret of harvesting. Without consulting each other, each had gone to the river to cut reeds growing on the banks, and had woven them together so cleverly that they had made a recipient that would serve to hold vegetables, bread and fruit.
But first, they studied their work, seeing similarities in the crisscross pattern and in the regular changes that they had learned to see in nature and in their bodies. With long flexible strands, they made other bowls and baskets. They learned to spin wool and to weave, squaring off space in reds and yellows, browns and blues, overlapping minutes with minutes and days with days, leaving for nights only the chance to dream of endless space. Time now belonged to the twelve first women. Their cleverness in slicing duration into regular cycles gave them the confidence to stand up to sorrow. When death visited a home, they would wrap the deceased in warm blankets woven with figures of panthers and snakes, of geometric shapes and, who knows why, tiny signs, impossible to read, thrown in the face of the plain cloth. When they had filled the earth with their measures knotted one to the next, they felt a great fatigue come on them. So each found the same stone frame scattered over great distances. The gate stood at the top of a mountain that no man could climb, and they decided to become the gatekeepers.
Since that time, the earth has turned like the sun, and even the hurried moon. Twelve hours a day, twelve hours a night. Around them, in the villages underneath, men and women built temples and houses, bridges and roads, forgetting the wisdom of the twelve Moments.
Then came the rain, here warm, here icy, but in great quantity. The earth around the gates first took on a bright darkness and then the water grew deeper, a trembling mirror where the twelve sentinels saw the mirage they carried.
At dawn, they all met, and in a single movement, they melted together into a single, high shape, immaterial, barely fragrant, rich with remembrance free of a single regret, light with the lack of ambition. The structure was glass, woven in paper, a mirror reflecting the levels of conquest, the wrinkles of fear and illusion far behind whoever approached it. This was a woman with cat eyes, with outstretched arms that knew not what to give.
The sky opened, blue dotted with blues, a trembling veil of thin bands of azure, cobalt and soft lights throwing shadows on whitish nets. Bird songs pecked little black holes in the colours hanging on empty scores and then flew out in long locks of tangled hair and native clumps. Matter let the sky celebrate the wedding of air and light. The sky closed over the moment that no longer claimed to speak. Only a woman's song accompanied it, to flee an icy terror. How many years did the prayer last? How many dances? How many whispers?
But then the sky pulled up in its newly recovered verticality, and lifted the sun with it, gradually recovering the mornings, noons and evenings. So time, enriched with the contemplation of the sky, carried away the high voices that moved off in the cosmos in red, yellow and green comets while others, still more serious, vibrated the strings stretched between two azure branches.
Twelve women took the sky in hand and caressed it. The first thought was a bird that she had held in her palm. The second became the petals slipping between her fingers, the third the pages of a book. Each dreamt of one a moment of grace when life finally breaks with time. Each, holding the sky in her palms, felt the transparency and vacuum that her fingers had always wanted to give. But the sky was growing as they watched. It was now the size of a zither, a viola, a harpsichord, and took root like a tree dreaming of the opalescence of jade. Each woman could have strummed a string, played to giddiness, but all refrained. They stood up and in the mirror that the sky gave them, they all saw the same lyre strung with silky threads whose breathing touched their very entrails.
Night returned to play a stringless lute.
V. And the night was terrifying. Clouds had welded into a murdering, milky mass weighing on the treetops and roofs and pathways. No rain, no noise, just a threat from above cramping the breathing and instilling fear.
Then a shape appeared. Vague and nameless. It became sharper with relief. It looked like a muscle, a calf, an arm, a breast. It was a mane, a back, a horse's head and, in the silence of midnight, came a terrible whinny. Wind swept over the world, spiraling as it ripped away all the words kept in memory, plans and ambitions and quiet contentment. No one was saved. Death struck and blustered, surprising some, relieving others. The horse trampled the earth, pulling wings off insects and feathers off birds, petals off flowers, vowels off words. Notes were torn off scores; no more commas, no more emptiness to rest in. Death struck and the horse of the wind struck as well. Black coffins, gravediggers, funeral pyres and weepers abounded. There were chants and gifts, sacrifices and resignation. But still the wind stormed. Men fled into caves and libraries, seeking the spell and invoking the stars. They made love again and again to maintain life and renew blood. And this was the first day.
The following rafts appeared day on the edge of the river.
Each carried the essentials. No provisions or treasures, no fruit or ore, no weapons or glass. A click on a clap. Gliding to their element. Free, drifting, a frail presence flying through the air like a shuttle. They have no regrets, no fears, carrying only the wealth of uneven boards, masts and sheets. The sails, flags, ropes are precious: made from river reeds, tender pine needles, worn cotton ribbons, silken threads, little paper words cut and torn that point and roll, dive and stretch. They carry the joy of the voyage, floating by memory to a spring that the ancients locate way up the mountain, but that is so strong it has dug the earth.
The river is the voyage, there is no ocean as mentioned in the legends to seek a final port of call because there is no port, not there, not anywhere on the banks. Nor is there a crossing, just the banks that the rafts follow. Dark screens, grey musical scores, windows on an illusion to which their movement responds.
There is no death; the water in these parts is not deep and the mud below is sweet. The raft disturbs the reflections, upsets the world, unties the thread. The raft floats and that is its only goal. The rafts follow each other, like migrating birds. Omens. Are there six or twelve? Will they show where to drive a stake? Will they find the centre?
The first bears a piece of sky in its sails, an arch, a feather, a lock of hair already tousled, and a little tent made from clouds. Before leaving the village, it hesitates. Shouldn't it carry at least the earthen statue that would protect him? It offered it to the river. Shouldn't it cut the garden flowers to have a present at the first stop? It won't stop, so there is no need. For a long time it shivered at the thought of leaving its books containing everything written about the universe and mankind. But one day, it dared break the binding and free the pages. As it tore the paper at random, the words escaped like graphs and the sounds sometimes came back to it to hang on the mast or the planks before floating off again.
The second is the colour of the paths of Italy, California and Thailand. It gives off nourishing warmth and the smell of the country. Flags and fabric link the deck to the masts and the masts to each other, along ropes and uncertain knots thrown to the winds. It looks carefree, but knows that the rays of the sun are hanging in the white paper berth at the end of the poop.
The third raft smells like forest and rock. The birth is longer and heavy. It is a tunnel, a gorge, an empty passage with nothing present. Linen canvas hands from the two masts made of reeds, shaking in the slightest breeze, spreading the threads of the canvas. It sails along shores where men and women are ready to welcome it, but it keeps on, carrying its secret. Everyone is intrigued. Dogs bark as it slides by, eagles move away. What is in that huge ball at the front? It looks like rope. Nothing visible, anyway. The vessel seems to carry emptiness and to protect it in carefully tangled twine. There is no skipper in the tent, no sign on the flags. Some murmur that it carries the trace of a moment, the breath of dust. Don't believe them.
The last is smaller than the others. The planks are set in a cross and the two masts carry no sails, only paper ribbons strung from threads as fine as glass. It is carried, it is passage, it moves forward as it if knew the river better than the others. As if it remembered which way to go. In the centre, not at the ends, the paper tent does not carry sunny gold, nor any fragment of sky, clouds even less. But it is curled on itself, clumsily kept to the ground by a little pile of wood red with earth. Something is sleeping here. Something has been soothed in the soul of the white raft.
VI. She prepared the dog's bed and saw that the birds had clean water. She peeled the fruit, cut it in pieces and put it in a bowl. She climbed a few steps, opened the bedroom door, went to the bed and pulled the blanket over the child's naked shoulder.
For a long time, she hadn't felt the difference between making a meal, loving life and reading a poem. She wrote a lot and sent messages to all her friends – birds, blades of grass, people – made of signs, some black, some white, that she threw from the top of a ladder. Sometimes for a few seconds, they would stand up, looking like people, magicians perhaps, wearing huge turbans. Sometimes she planted them in the ground or hung them on branches of trees, so they looked like characters of calligraphy with names to be pronounced. But there was no name to give, just pieces of wood and paper that she cut and knotted. The world had given her a name: she was the artist. She lived most of her time on a raft, that traveled without her guidance, although she knew that she had her place on this floating conveyance.
For hours, she had patiently constructed a cabin with no window or roof around the mast that now served only to fly signals. Alone, with a little gap to let her get out, she set foot on shore to present her offerings and make every occupation a noble practice. At the heart of this space that no one can enter, she lived with herself in an empty room where air and light filter through the walls. There she met silence, and listened.
Safely sheltered, carried by the river, she watched for a long time and now meant to answer. She thought she had already seen silence when as a child she slipped to the heart of the red beech through a crack in the bark. The silence of the library revealed her to herself. She thought she would find it in the books all lined up, but later, often by accident, she would spot it on the edge of a broad landscape or a kitchen table. Silence followed her into places that she would have liked never to go, because there are times when words themselves have no force and have no choice but to join the unexpressed. Already the child, the adolescent and then the mother had realized the inexpressible unity of the world protected by the final full stop of a text or a speech. The artist remembered. Intuition does not wait for knowledge. And intuition had guided her from the path of simple gestures whose very repetition ensures their value as they take her with certainly to the focal point of herself and the universe. Thanks to them, she could ignore the useless noise made by notes when they hang on scores and letters when they spill over horizontal lines.
But the silence she had met in her paper observatory was still deeper. It had all the books and all the languages of the world, all the written wisdom and all the recorded signs, all the images drawn and dreams remembered in images. It had even carried off the stars and death, dust and time. It did not need to walk or to fly, to dive to the bottom of the sea or to join the blue of the endless sky. It was a dark pearl offered to her. And she offered herself to it.
“ In the midst of silence, a word was spoken to me” (M. Eckhart).