Sun House, page 36
Dear TJ,
Thanks for Jervis’s books! As feared, I love them so much I’m having a hell of a time getting my thesis paintings done. If Catholicism hadn’t kicked out the likes of Mechthild, Hadewijch & Marguerite I might not have fled my girlhood faith. How insane of Holy Church the Little to damn their female bodhisattvas! But the good news is, the Beguines are with us now, outside the effing Church, safe from the pundits & patriarchs who’d do nothing but dissect & codify their blazing hearts if they were still “in the fold.”
But the next part of your letter mystified me. I read your description of “Jervis’s condition” three times. Each time I had less of an idea what you’re talking about. You say: “I’m hoping his sense of being literally ‘in Ocean’ is a trauma symptom that will ease as he gains strength, so he can lead a pared-down but fairly normal life.” For God’s sake, TJ! What has Jervis ever had to do with “pared-down” or “normal,” & why would you want that for him? Is this the same TJ who, when Jervis was in the coma, lovingly recited tales of his night sailing fuckups, promising Jervis & God you’d never complain of any vessels he might sink if only he’d return to you? Well, here he is, TJ, & according to him an entire Ocean, who turns out to be female & infinite, is here with him too, & being in her is bliss! Why in the name of Love would you call this a “trauma symptom,” or want it to “ease”? May I humbly suggest you summon your great courage, move the hell out of Holy Church the Little into Holy Church the Great, & never mention Jervis settling for “pared-down” or “normal” again? To quote an Ocean-goer, “The fuck, Teej!” When we read Beguine accounts of annihilations, illuminations & awakenings we’re not idling the day away in some safe little Marvel comic or Hitchhiker’s Guide wonderment. We’re reading of the soul exploding into our insanely normal world in a blessedly abnormal state of awareness! Seconds before his beating, Jervis burst into a state the Bertrand Russells of this world can only slander as “unmitigated rubbish” about rivers entering the sea. Before accepting this, ask yourself what Bertrand might have done if faced with the same two meth thugs in mid-murder & pick your hero! Rather than read books about the Beguines, Jervis has erupted into the Love that erupted in them, shooting far beyond our understanding, but not beyond our love & awe. The same way I adored you the moment you insisted you were not my brother, but my mother-brother, I adored Jervis the moment he woke from his coma & whispered, “Zosima wasn’t kidding. All is an Ocean.” What could be better than his companionship as we play the game of Love for keeps? I hope I’ve offended you just enough to help you stop playing nurse & turn the corner on this! I cherish you both.
—Risa
Late night, February 1990. Jervis and TJ alone in the Hoyt Street monk’s cell. A single candle, guttering a little, stands on the bookless fruit crate that now serves as a coffee table. Close beside it, Jervis hunches like an injured owl in his crappy little canvas chair.
TJ serves them both tea, sits in a half lotus on Jervis’s crummy futon, and speaks words Risa’s letter has made available to him: “Your disabilities are still so serious I keep thinking like a nurse, not a brother. A brother wouldn’t try to hide from your genuine ongoing experience, or refuse to be your Holy Church the Great companion. What foolishness. I’m sorry to have done that.”
Jervis shrugs. Paper-whispers, “You’re always my Teej, Teej.”
“I am your Teej. But Nurse Teej isn’t. I want the Ocean you love to mean as much to me as she does to you. And when ‘the Roman Men’s Club,’ as Risa calls it, destroyed the Beguines and condemned Eckhart, they rendered themselves, and ratiocinative sorts like me, ignorant of Ocean Language. This Ocean you’re feeling, no offense, is a zero to me so far. I do have faith in what you’re experiencing, but it’s blind faith. I haven’t felt a drop of brine, smelled the sea, heard a gull’s cry. And maybe that’s how it has to be. But if possible, I’d love to be with you in this. So if ever you could describe even a little of what—”
It dismays TJ to see Jervis shaking his head before he’s even finished. “The way your mind is, Teej, words won’t help. Your mind has its hands stuffed in its pockets as you ask to be handed a glass of Ocean. Anything I say to that mind will just fall on the floor and shatter.”
“I can get my hands out of my pockets!” TJ cries. “I can put my mind away, Jervis. I will put it away. I’ve learned how. Just give me a minute.”
TJ draws a breath, then pulls the little purse out of his shirt, opens it, fishes out Tiny Joseph. Drying his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt, he kisses Joseph with dry lips only. Taking the muñequita’s tiny hand between his index finger and thumb, he aims Joseph at Jervis. “To keep Jervis’s words from falling on the floor and breaking,” TJ tells the doll, “I need to go away. So will you watch and listen for me, Joseph? And if he hands you a glass of Ocean, will you later tell me how it tasted and sounded and felt?”
Tiny Joseph does the full-body bow that serves as his nod.
TJ nods back, closes his eyes, lowers his head, and dives for nothingness. His neck and shoulders relax. His head inclines toward Jervis. His eyes close and stay closed. His breaths come slow and deep.
The diminutive periods that serve as Joseph’s eyes peer at Jervis:
. .
Jervis’s glass eye is veered off toward the ceiling, but his good eye peers steadily at the doll. Silent moments pass. When Jervis begins to speak, his paper-whisper is slow and concise, leaving pauses between each statement to help TJ grasp them:
“I can’t describe Ocean without help from the Beguines and the Meister…The Meister says, ‘A man had a dream, a waking dream, in which he was great with nothingness, as a woman with child. In this nothingness, Ocean was born.’ Ocean, the fruit of nothingness, is the endless one, Teej. The shoreless one…She’s got no form but contains all forms…Never changes but creates all change…We can’t find her by seeking because she’s already in all the places we search…And I was crazy when I’d plead, ‘Be with me, never leave me, stay with me,’ because she was. She’s the Forever Here, and we leave her and leave her even as we claim to love her. She forgives us even so…She’s the love that’s there the instant we love something or someone, and the love that’s still there after we and our someone are dust.”
Staying out of it, letting Tiny Joseph do the seeing and listening, TJ allows the words to wash over, soaking him, stirring him, yet remains as passive as the beach sand swirling through incoming and outgoing waves.
The intensity of Jervis’s papery voice ramps up: “Here’s the hard thing, Teej. Here’s the very very hard thing. Whoever life harms, she heals. But almost never in ways we get to see. You need Ocean’s own eye to see her work the healing. So to mention her insane mercy sounds like a lie to a human mind. Her mercy can’t sound true to a mind because it’s inaccessible to the mind. We grasp her mercy when we feel her. When I’m gone into feeling her, she is the mercy, triumphant inside the havoc. When I’m gone into feeling her, creation and destruction are two necessary powers, she’s inside both, and she has no preference between them. When I’m gone into feeling her, I too lose all preference. Her insane mercy weaves all of it. Not just parts, like my old me preferred. Not just goodness, like most humans prefer. Not just life, as most prefer. Her mercy weaves the wrecked and the wreckers, the truth-tellers and the liars, the life-takers and life-givers. Because she is, there’s this impossible, endlessly destructible yet indestructible whole.”
Eyes closed, Tiny Joseph in hand, self long gone, a TJ-shaped nothingness listens.
“I’m going to tell my dumpster story now because she feels you wanting to hear it. But it’ll only be words. I can’t language it. So I’ll only tell it once—and don’t ask questions when I’m done. Okay?”
TJ remains motionless, appearing not to have heard…but Tiny Joseph repeats the curt bow that is his nod.
“Before I flooded I’d tell Ocean all sorts of things. ‘I love you.’ ‘I adore you.’ ‘Please let me serve you.’ I caught glimpses of her in Umbria that dazzled me so blind I’d talk that way. The fuck. I did not adore her. Too busy jibber-jabbering.
“A thing I’ve never told. In the Clare cave, what I heard. In the cave Clare said, ‘Soul in eternity’s mirror, heart at sea. You’re ready, Jervis. You’re ready.’ But her saying my name, saying I’m ready, made me fall to pieces. The soul, when it opens, is vast, vast, vast and empty, empty, empty. That’s her splendor, and it was right there in that cave. But I couldn’t simple me down enough to stay inside it. I’d have stood outside her, sobbing and jabbering, ‘I adore you,’ till doomsday. I was saved from that doom when I got dumpstered.”
Tiny Joseph whispers, “This is what TJ longs to hear described.”
“Words can’t describe it. But Ocean’s making Teej long. Listen with that longing. No Teej, Teej. Just the longing.”
From TJ, no reaction. From Tiny Joseph, another curt bow.
“I hear a whump, then a moan behind the dumpster. I go to it. I find Kryptonite and Two-by-Four killing a man. Knowing it won’t stop them, I stand over the man. As soon as they look at me I feel death coming so fast there’s only an eyeblink of time to do one thing. No thinky. Just one unthought thing. No longer knowing how to speak, obeying no created thing but love, I give myself up to love completely. And not my crappy, sobbing, ‘I adore you’ Clare-cave love. When Kryptonite and Two-by-Four step to opposite sides of me and God creates the impossible situation, finally, finally! my old me simples down to something so close to nothing that Clare’s, Marguerite’s, and the Meister’s Love floods everything. And it’s so powerful, so blissful, so glorious there’s no words for it. As the two-by-four shatters my arm Ocean inundates me. As they obliterate my face and head she immerses me. As they kick, stomp, and beat me to death she surrounds and preserves me. Yet I mean to death. The heart Officer Barrios found beating in the dumpster is not mine. It’s Ocean’s now. And Ocean just loves. So no more talk, okay? Let’s feel her nonstop for a while, okay? Will you walk in her with me now, Teej?”
Eyes still shut, thumb and forefinger still holding the doll he has somehow kept aimed at Jervis, TJ comes to himself and his closed eyes begin to stream. “Okay, Jervis!” he gasps. “Okay! But Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ, Jervis! But okay.”
II. Mr. Wrong
(Providence, Rhode Island, 1991)
It is like one of those traps…in fairy tales. If I accept this gift it is bad and fatal. Its virtue becomes apparent through my refusal of it.
—Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls
AFTER GRADUATING FROM University of Washington with high honors, Risa knew she should have been thrilled to receive a full-tuition scholarship to the MFA program at Rhode Island School of Design. But she also knew why she wasn’t thrilled. She’d chosen the most financially advantageous path into the next chapter of her life, knowing that the guidance of her heart, to the contrary, had chosen the path that once caused her to write,
The distance that separates heaven & Earth can be annihilated. A bridge lies between. Right here within the body is an Infinite Person, higher than which there is nothing.
It didn’t take Risa long to discover the kinds of places she could be carried by a financially advantageous path lacking heart guidance:
She met Julian Ventano during her first month at Rhode Island School of Design in a graduate seminar called Yeah, Right: Irony as Modus Operandi in Post-Modern Art. The instructor, Julia Gage, was an art historian working on a PhD thesis on art and irony. Two weeks into the semester-long seminar, Julian had dubbed his fellow students “Irony Seminarians” and his class notes, Risa would learn, included these characterizations:
•Not-Quite Dr. Gage: sinewy, whip-smart, lamentably gay, Post-Modern Post-Male associate prof who designed this interesting mess.
•Jonathan Grens: scrawny, wild-eyed, renegade Bible-college-dropout-turned-ceramics-sculptor who adds text to human figures to poke fun at evangelicals. Sample sculpture: a half-life-sized, absolute bombshell “Eve” whose entire body, even her lips, eyelids, nipples, pudendum, is tattooed with 12 pt. type quoting living theologians expounding dead seriously, hence hilariously, upon “this supremely criminal woman.” Grens’s title for this work: 6,000 Years Ago: Eve. 38-23-36!
I love this fucking guy!
•Klaus Hauptmann: misty-eyed German-born Werner Herzog–accented philosophy geek given to interminable discourses upon The Creative Process, Sacred Rites, Art as Empathy, The Exploitation of Indigenous Peoples, and other uppercase prefab totally predictable topics that vacuum the creativity and empathy right out of the room.
•Anna Hallstrom: heroically buxom, pretty-if-you-like-the-cow-eyed-type, boob-negatingly-fatalistic enviro studies devotee who wouldn’t know irony if it smashed her in the face. Sample repartee: “What kind of art do you do, Anna?” “I show the ways they are Killing Our Earth!” “Who, Anna?” “They!” “Could you be less buxom and more specific?” “No! They are Killing Our Earth!” “Who, Anna, who?” “All of them!” “Which ones?!” “THEY!”
•Nita Hymes: Anna’s lover, great-grand-niece of some famous old linguist-folklorist, owner of the cutest jug ears I’ve ever seen, and a great pen-and-ink artist. I mean Paul-Klee-Lebbeus-Woods-great. But thanks to Anna’s darkly boobulous take on humanity’s futureless future Nita’s recent work all tests Heinous Apocalypse Positive. The good news is, Nita might really blossom under Not-Quite Dr. Gage’s sinewy tutelage. I see subtle sparks flying, and Anna’s so busy tracking THEM! that she sees nothing. How great if Julia Gage were to become Anna’s next evil THEY!
•Will Jones: an enormous, enormously skilled woodworker whose latest effort is a line of perverse furniture he dubs “Angst Nouveau.” Examples: a set of four alder-wood barstools with seats slanted so steeply to right, left, or forward that they propel occupants onto the floor no matter how sober they are; a Mission-style love seat out the back of which protrude five lethally sharp wooden spikes; a maple analyst’s couch with a back so arched it forces the patient’s pelvis to thrust toward the ceiling as if on the verge of orgasm. One-liners, really—but so well wrought I’m jealous!
•Moi: an abstract painter secondarily but bon vivant primarily, because there will be no Picassos in my generation. As we Irony Seminarians illustrate, ours is a brood of corporate-cloned, Roundup Ready, obsessively “correct” PMOs (Psychologically Modified Organisms) preprogrammed by the ruling suicide culture to self-destruct if we try to break free of it, and those who deny our doom and strive for “freedom” or “greatness” merely annoy the rest of us by rattling their chains. Case in point:
•Risa O Risa McKeig: a not-unskilled neo-impressionist painter with runaway hair, a voice as deep and dark as her eyes, an O my! body, but a chain-rattling addiction to “spiritual imagery” born of ancient Indian wisdoms. The working title of her MFA thesis: “Landscapes of the Inner Eye.” Nuff said! But it gets worse: a recent oil she did of a street woman actually moved me till she informed us it had been inspired by a Gandhi quote: “Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen and ask yourself if the next step you contemplate is going to be of use to him.” Gag me with an Ideal! But the joke’s on me. Risa’s physical presence has turned my mind into a piece of space junk helplessly orbiting her day and night, and my body into Gandhi’s “poorest, weakest man”! If the next step I contemplate is to be of use to this man I need to hook up with Risa ASAP, ancient wisdoms and Inner Eyes be damned!
USING RAVE LETTERS of recommendation from the renowned Portland restaurateur TJ McGraff and architect Theo Avery, Risa had landed an assistant manager–bartender job at a high-end Providence restaurant, The Dorrance. One night Julian Ventano strolled gracefully in, chose the barstool directly in front of her, and leveled his high-beams upon her.
Like countless women before her, Risa’s first impression was that he might be the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Italian on his father’s side, Afghani on his mother’s, with an Ethiopian grandparent in the mix, he shone with a paradoxically bright darkness set off by perfect teeth and two-toned green and hazel eyes. His dark curly hair, perfectly proportioned body, and living colors made Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man look like a mannequin by comparison. But Risa also suspected the words “ridiculously handsome” might in some way apply.
Given that, did it fascinate her, or was it weird, that Julian was not a RISD student? During their self-introductions at Julia Gage’s seminar, Julian said he lived and painted in Providence, and that was all he said. So. Pretty painter man with connections sufficient to audit a class he wasn’t paying for. That was all Risa knew. Yet the smile he now leveled upon her set off a jumble of feelings: gratification at being the recipient of his attention; embarrassment at being gratified for such a thin reason; fear that they wouldn’t like each other; greater fear that they would. This man, she saw at once, was what TJ would call “a lighthouse”: his appearance, it haunted her to realize, mirrored her own in that it situated him, whether he liked it or not, upon stony reefs that signaled the opposite of a safe harbor. But what if there was something to learn here? What if he didn’t like casting spells any more than she did? Maybe we could call a truce and form a spell-free alliance, Risa thought. Maybe we could even teach each other how not to cast spells we don’t wish to cast.
Julian ordered an IPA, then struck up a conversation by asking Risa about her education up until RISD. She needed just thirty seconds to describe her double major at U Dub, her decision to drop Asian religions and focus on art, and the hard-earned scholarship that had brought her to Rhode Island School of Design. “Your turn,” she said.
“My education isn’t so succinct,” he warned just as Jorie, one of the waiters, handed Risa a drink order. “How’s your tolerance for detail?” Julian asked.
