Spires - Worldling

WORLDLING Elizabeth Spires W. W. NORTON & COMPANY New York London Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks FOR CELIA DOVELL If then all that worldlings prizeBe contracted to a rose;Sweetly there indeed it lies, But it biteth in the close. GEORGE HERBERT Men are the mortals, the only mortal things in existence, because unlike animals they do not exist only as members of a species whose immortal life is guaranteed through procreation. The mortality of men lies in the fact that individual life, with a recognizable life-story from birth to death, rises out of biological life.

This individual life is distinguished from all other things by the rectilinear course of its movement, which, so to speak, cuts through the circular movement of biological life. This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order. HANNAH ARENDT The Human Condition I found a white stone on the beach inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow. All night Id slept in fits and starts, my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide. And then morning. And then a walk, the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.

I felt its calm power as I held it and wished a wish I cannot tell. It fit in my hand like a hand gently holding my hand through a sleepless night. A stone so like, so unlike, all the others it could only be mine. The wordless white stone of my life! In a world of souls, I set out to find them. They who first must find each other, be each others fate. Is it you? I would ask. Are you the ones?No, no, they said, or said nothing at all. Are you the ones?No, no, they said, or said nothing at all.

How many cottages did I pass, each with a mother, a father, a firstborn, newly swaddled, crying; or sitting in its little chair, dipping a fat wooden spoon into a steaming bowl, its mother singing it a foolish song, One, one, a lilys my care... Through seasons I searched, through years I cant remember, reading the lichens and stones as if one were marked with my name, my face, my form. By night and day I searched, never sleeping, not wanting to fail, not wanting to simply be a star. Finally in a town like any other town, in a house foursquare and shining, its door wide open to the moon, did I find them. There, at the top of the winding stairs, asleep in the big bed, the sheets thrown off, curled like question marks into each others arms. Past memory, I beheld them, naked, their bodies without flaw. I, the nameless one. I, the nameless one.

And my parents, spent by the dream of creation, slept on. My life slows and deepens. I am thirty-eight, neither here nor there. It is a morning in July, hot and clear. Out in the field, a bird repeats its quaternary call, four notes insisting, Im here, Im here. The field is unmowed, summers wreckage everywhere.

Even this early, all is expectancy. It is as if I float on a still pond, drowsing in the bottom of a rowboat, curled like a leaf into myself. The water laps at its old wooden sides as the sun beats down on my body, a wand, an enchantment, shaping it into something languid and new. A year ago, two, I dreamed I held a mirror to your unborn face and saw you, in that warped, watery glass, not as a child but as you will be twenty years from now. I woke, a light breeze lifting the curtain, as if touched by a ghosts thin hand, light filling the room, coming from nowhere. I know the time, the place of our meeting.

It will be January, the coldest night of the year. You will be carrying a lantern as you enter the world crying, and I cry to hear you cry. A moment that, even now, I carry in my body. Is this a dream? The August sun, the trees in the moment before their decline, the high bodiless clouds skimming the horizon, the water a second skin my strokes slough off, and Celia swimming her small strokes inside me as I swim? Celia, the first and only one, who fits like a seed in my sleeping palm, who comes unspeaking to me in dreams, her eyes half blue, half brown. I cannot remember my own time, floating in the warm birth sac, my mother asleep, the waters still, the two of us dreaming. Speak. Speak. Speak.

Before birth erases memory and suddenly you are taken from me, then given back, wrapped in the white gown of forgetting, changed, utterly changed. As I will be. This is our summer, the summer of the dream we will, too soon, awaken from, shocked and surprised, in our separate bodies. 1.29.91 In the theatre of pain where all things are born and brought into the light, I found myself one night, the world contracting to a dream of world, a nightmare ocean I waded into, wave after wave knocking me down, holding me in pains undertow until I thought Id drown. And then a needle stopped the pain and I was on an island where no wind blew and no tree cast a shadow, where to feel nothing at all was all I could desire. Somewhere a clock ticked madly but time, for a little while, stood still until, again, the pain broke through, all flash and sear, and the moment slowly approached when we would meet, meet for the first time.

With a final push you were born, a fact engraved upon the world forever, leaving the two of us half-drowned and clinging to the shore, hands dragging us back from the black water. Through corridors of birth and death we were wheeled to a high room overlooking the city, the rising sun tinting the clouds, the empty stadium, pink and blue, rush hour traffic moving soundlessly down 33rd Street, radios tuned to the morning news, completely, most completely, unaware of you. The shift was changing. Breakfast was being brought around. Two nurses entered with a tray and news of the world Id left for a day and returned to, the paper singing of death, only death, death in the face of life. How often had they seen that scene before, the common tableau of mother and sleeping newborn, your face a perfect rose, so small, so royal? But no, amazed, they bent over you, lifting you high into the air, carrying you with fanfare to the window, streamers of light everywhere, saying (I swear to God they said), Welcome to the World! They come in white livery bringing the sun, the Robed Heart astride her white mount, crowds lining the royal road in anticipation.

Ahead, the castle flying the new colors, a queens great labors come to an end. A shout, and the cord is cut, the crown placed upon my head. And I am, Mother, I am! The ward is quiet, the mothers delivered, except in one a woman labors still and calls, with a sharp cry, that she is dying. She is not dying but cannot know it now. Trapped in the birthstorm, I did not cry, but saw my body as the enemy I could not accommodate, could not deny. Morning arrived, and my daughter.

Thats how it is in this world, birth, death, matter-of-fact, happening like that. The room was warm. The room was full of flowers, her face all petals and leaves, a flower resembling such as I had never seen. All day she slept beside me, eyes darting beneath bruised blue eyelids, retracing the journey, dreaming the birth dream over and over until it held no fear for her. I dared not wake her. The hours passed.

I rested as her soul poured in her body, the way clear water, poured from a height, takes the shape of a flaring vase or glass, or light fills a rooms corners on a brilliant winter morning. Slowly, she opened her eyes, a second waking, taking me by surprise, a bright being peering out from behind dark eyes, as if she already knew what sights would be seen, what marvels lay ahead of her, weariness and woe, the joists and beams, the underpinnings of the world shifting a little to make room for her. The first day was over forever. Tranced, I picked up the pen, the paper, and wrote: