Hunger's Brides Page 9

  … Charmed particles, anti-particles—with left-hand spin or right, strong forces and weak and sinister … like spells chanted over a cauldron, even as the stew of matter dematerializes. A language redolent of reinvested meanings, a charismatic language—‘charismatic,’ from the Indo-European gher, to desire, to yearn. With a ferry token for the wrothful Charon, the charmed traveller reaches out across the Straits of Messina, past the whirlpool of Charybdis, through the Greek charizesthai—to show favour, or invoke it, and finally up the beach over the more familiar eukharistía of simple gratitude. The basic eucharistic function of this language being to reinvest the material with meaning and therewith beseech divine favour: charys or grace.

  Grace, said by our poet physicists over a nervous meal of stew and figs, spread between the strands of Scylla and Charybdis …

  After twenty pages of this, she pauses for a small excursus into Hawking’s anthropic principle—much maligned by his colleagues precisely for being mythological and therefore unscientific. She stages a spirited defence of his physics from a poetic perspective. Then a spirited critique of his poetry from a quantum physics perspective. By page forty, you notice that all along she’s been edging toward some thunderous megrim of her own—something scathing and strangely funny, her misanthropic principle.

  In concluding (on about page fifty), she asks, “Why all these quantum leaps of metaphor? To make the work of physicists more accessible to the uninitiated? Or is it to reassure themselves, as though, without the primitive poetic charge, our seekers have not delved deeply enough into the charismatic mysteries?” She then compounds the unforgivable by asking a fourth consecutive question in her conclusion.

  Can it be that our quantum physicists are only appealing, as so many before them, to a Muse to bless their poesy? Erato, say, or Polymathia or Polyhymnia. So much the better. If God does not play dice with the universe—she does not like doggerel, either.

  But then, maybe the Muse dices physicists. By 1935 Einstein’s doubts about a dice-playing God had badly shaken his quantum mechanical faith. Its most unbearable corollary was entanglement—instantaneous interaction at a distance. Interact with one particle in a spin-half pair and see its other half pirouette instantaneously, even half a galaxy away—snake eyes in the crapshoot of quantum fortunes. Time to call the pit boss. Time to call in Terpsichore.

  At its root, Einstein’s disenchantment is aesthetic. The free verse of such entanglements was intolerable to him poetically, offending his sense of order and elegance. And so the superb mind that had found nothing unthinkable balked, for once, at entanglement.19

  Maybe it had just been far too long since the good professor was out before the moonrise, strolling arm in arm beneath the space-time canopy, to watch the spin-half pair of Castor and Pollux … enchanted double stars with club and lyre, dancing in the house of Gemini.

  But now, entanglements in Time: who shall their Muse and poets be?

  You can—and I did—quarrel with Beulah’s conclusions, but the overall impression is of her playing your thin tune with her left hand, her own étude with the right, while balancing the globe on the tip of her nose as she rocks back and forth on a unicycle. Meanwhile, the true final line remains unstated: But of course, my Misanthropic Principal, you must feel entirely free to give my little effort the grade you think it merits.

  It had started on the first day of class. I was favoured with my first private audience, outside office hours, of course, but she did knock. White tennis shoes, black jeans, long auburn hair gathered at her nape in a silver clasp, the arresting eyes I had not seen at close range. She wore a long-sleeved, white cotton turtleneck, and over it, in the manner of a smock, an extra-large men’s T-shirt, short-sleeved, black.

  She asked if I really intended to call John Smith to Anne Bradstreet early American literature. Because I must realize it was not early, not really American and not much of it literature. Do go on. Third century—even the ninth—that was early. Or 1492, as the beginning of the end.

  “Your Americas, Professor, look like some Puritan’s idea of New England.”

  It was churlish of me, but I pointed out that had she done even the most cursory research, she’d have seen what the course was to cover.

  “Oh yes, your outline was fascinating.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s like a course in prejudice.”

  The tone was playful, the eyes were not.

  “It’s Beulah something, isn’t it?”

  “Which makes you Professor Somebody, doesn’t it.”

  I thought it a good moment to start over. The job really doesn’t have to be difficult.

  “I meant no offence.”

  “Limosneros. Don’t make it rhyme with rhinoceros. Please.”

  “I think I can manage.”

  “BYOOlah LeemosNEHRos—how’s that?”

  “Prejudices against what?”

  “Let’s see, Professor …” She used the long fingers of a small hand to count the ways. “There’s the Lateeno. The Catholic. The fee-male … Oh right, and the Baroque.”

  I glanced out the window, deciding if was I being called a hick, bigot, Puritan or some fresh mix of the three.

  I didn’t get time to phrase the question. She’d swayed out, leaving the door ajar. Ah, but they did keep us young. Beulah Limosneros, Day One. The immediate effect: me deciding to change the course name for the following year. Nothing wrong with it per se, aside from being unexpectedly revealing. Her charges weren’t fair, of course, not balanced, certainly, but neither were they wild shots in the dark, not completely.

  But then, I was still assuming she’d been working with just the course outline, when by the first day of class she’d already skimmed everything I’d ever published. Her paper on quantum physics arrived on my desk a month later, and it was the perfect lure.

  I’d come to a professional interest in literature late in life, while in France finishing up a doctorate in philosophy. From eight years at the summits of Scepticism and Empiricism—chez Ockham, Bacon, Descartes, Hume & cie—I had descended with a pressing wish to meet women. Ergo literature. The paper that changed the course of my academic career was only a lark. “James Fenimore Cooper and the Negative Way.”

  The short version: If you want to better understand the true, study the liar.

  The long version: In radical mysticism, the negative way holds God to be unknowable, and goes from what can only be said inadequately to the great mystery of what cannot be said at all. A first dim step on that dark road is the attempt to say what God is not. Do this completely enough, and you are left with a cut-out of God, a template, a negative; list off all the false names and be left with the One True Name, and so on.

  Though God is not of direct professional interest to sceptics, except of course as the anti-Christ, the method was promising.

  James Fenimore Cooper, on the other hand, whose novels had been plunked down on my nightstand when I was a boy, was of enormous professional interest. He’d pretty much invented the myth of the American frontier and was singled out by Mark Twain as its biggest liar. Twain had done most of the heavy lifting. I did little more than list and categorize Cooper’s techniques in the high art of falsification. My study ended with something wry about James Fenimore Cooper’s great service to Truth, by exempting everything he touched from the need for serious inquiry. Looking for the authentic in his work was indeed to chase down the last of the Mohicans. I believe my unfortunate last line read, If, however, someone were to come along equipped to lie about everything at once, the stars themselves might wink out.

  One winces to read this sort of thing now. It makes for a rather large target.† Yet the high road for my Cooper and the negative way was already paved and deliciously smooth. In those heady days of the late seventies, the knowability of Truth was becoming as problematical as God’s had once been. And a quite elevated number of people found themselves preferring Truth’s unknowability to its non-existence. Moreover, the smart-alecky tone
was consonant with postmodernism’s sophomoric triumphalism, and therefore publishable. So the notion had legs, and I had my bailiwick: literature as via negativa.

  A little string of publications followed.20 It didn’t hurt that my advanced studies had been in Paris under a French superstar (whom it would seem kindest to identify here as X.Z.). To the French, this meant I was at least capable of receiving culture, an imprimatur that turned out to be lofty enough for pretty much everyone else. For a while I pursued (against the grain, as it were) two careers, one in French, the other in English—sardonic sceptic in Europe, lyrical empiricist in America. I only moved back to Canada when I realized that I could accomplish the same results with a single paper for the two audiences. In fact, I could effect no other result, no matter what I wrote in either language.

  Of course, the circle of researchers was tight and the topic obscure, but the conference sessions were often well attended. In Europe, the German sophisticate could indulge his own early childhood frontier fantasies. I came to call it the Karl May effect.† As for the French attendees, with me they could slum permissibly in a petite cabane de bois. This was an adult fantasy fully accessible only to the French, but the newcomer experienced it as a sort of lost weekend involving equal parts Rousseau, red Indian and maple syrup.

  In America, on the other hand, the notions of literature as anti-truth, and Truth as poetic figure, brought a je ne sais quoi of European perversion to conferences that might otherwise have seemed exercises in parish civics.

  The minute I started reading Beulah’s paper on the poetry of physics, I saw that she had indeed done her research. I was mildly flattered that she was showing off for me. Rereading it three years later, I’m tempted to say I still had no idea what she was up to.† She was not hunting for higher grades, she was baiting a hook. And her timing was good.

  At the same time, she had far bigger fish to concern herself with. In the first of many winding searches through the stacks of the university library tower, Beulah unearthed a little gem by Ermilio Abreu Gomez titled La ruta de Sor Juana, a work putting her on the nun’s trail. Photos—of the poet’s birthplace, the villages of her early period, the surrounding countryside—maps, portraits of her confessor and prelates, reproductions of diverse documents. All invaluable raw material. Beulah writes:

  … born, 1648, San Miguel de Nepantla. On slopes of volcano Popocatepetl … over 18,000 feet. Wet stormy summers. Snakes scorpions tarantulas flushed from crevices. Humid. Sheet lightning, distant rain. Houses low adobe, some whitewash. Claytiled red roofs. Low stone walls along roads into town.

  … Wisp of green, green whisper of river in the distance … spreading shade trees, moist grassy banks. Day skies pale blue sprouting wings—butterflies swallows hummingbirds hawks.

  Cirrus in the afternoon—cicadas dust and heat. Quick little lizards, tubular iguanas.

  Winter nights cold windy sky full of stars. Night owls and bats.

  … Playing, alone. Little girl, lovely, talk of the village. Mother tough independent beautiful. Diego the new lover—three more bastard children. Wicked tongues wagging. Diego’s no farmer. No privacy for Isabel—whole village knows about her. Grasping sour Diego a pretender an extractor. Was he charming …? What binds them together?

  What binds us? What is this thing?

  If Beulah was searching out the thread of a connection to Sor Juana, she had only to begin with the Mexican poet’s own self-analysis, written in 1691 in a letter of self-defence addressed to a bishop:

  From the moment I was first illuminated by the light of reason, my inclination toward letters has been so vehement that not even the admonitions of others … nor my own meditations have been sufficient to cause me to forswear this natural impulse that God placed in me … that inclination exploded in me like gunpowder….21

  Down through the years, much has been made of Sor Juana’s voracious hunger for learning. And even a glance over the list of materials Beulah was to consult—and voluminously annotate—indicates that her own quest must have grown to consume as many as fourteen hours a day. Here, then, was that first incandescent thread, a connection Beulah was curiously slow to grasp and ultimately unable to defuse: an inclination to study that eventually went off like gunpowder.

  Her first major obstacle, oddly enough, was on the library tower’s tenth floor, in the Hispanic Studies area. The on-line catalogue had indicated several titles that should have been shelved alongside La ruta de Sor Juana. Finding almost none of them, she checked the catalogue again, but the books hadn’t been signed out. So where were they?

  Reading her journal entry for this day, I imagine her now, striding down the aisles, eyeing each student immured in a stack of books as the possible culprit, and in the process no doubt eliciting a few curious stares herself. She suspects that someone has made off with the whole section in order to hoard it in some out-of-the-way corner. Finally, exasperated, she goes to ask just what the hell is going on. A long-suffering librarian, maybe flinching just perceptibly, informs her the university has begun selling off some of its special-interest collections in the face of funding cutbacks. A powerful private university (“rich fascists”) in the eastern United States is purchasing many of the rarest titles in the fields of Latin American history and culture. The library is slowly getting around to deleting them from the computer. Now the books can only be obtained through interlibrary loans, a process both expensive and slow.

  Waiting impatiently for each new book to arrive, fuming at each fresh delay, Beulah hits upon a strategy—of going to a section, for example Mexican Colonial History, to look doggedly through every book index for some mention of Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor / Sister.

  Late one evening just before closing, her eye falls upon the following series of index entries:

  Innocente IV, 58, 59, 76, 271

  Inquisitio generalis, 63–64

  Inquisitio specialis, 64–65

  She pauses, tired but alert now, thoughts turning in narrowing circles around an as-yet indistinct point—then the sudden leap. The Inquisition. Excitedly she flips the book shut to discover she holds in her hands Medina’s meticulously detailed Historia de la Inquisición en México. Beulah has just rounded the first sharp bend in the path. She has entered her labyrinth.

  †for future colleagues, of course, and other enemies—but now, a dozen years on, an undergraduate

  †Karl May being Germany’s over-the-top answer to Cooper. So when I called Beulah in to discuss her paper, it gave her a savage pleasure to tell me that May—thief, impostor, ex-convict, icon—was the best-loved author of Einstein’s boyhood

  †But then, I did keep a copy. I’ll admit the paper was an extraordinary example of something

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ,

  LOVE IS A GREATER LABYRINTH

  B. Limosneros, trans.

  ARIADNA:

  Amo a Teseo, y temo de manera

  su muerte, que me fuera más ligero

  tormento si, muriendo yo primero,

  los riesgos de su vida no temiera.

  Mil veces mi temor lo considera

  blandido sobre el cuello el duro acero,

  y tantas veces yo del susto muero

  cuantas presumo que él morir pudiera.

  Y no es el mayor daño, si se advierte,

  estar de tantos riesgos combatida,

  que otro mal tengo que temer más fuerte:

  que es pensar que con alma fementida,

  en algún tiempo puede darme muerte,

  a quien yo tantas veces doy la vida.

  ARIADNE:

  I love Theseus, and thus

  his death do dread—the lighter

  torment were to die first, no longer

  to fear for his life’s threats.

  A thousand times does terror brandish

  its icy steel against my throat;

  just so many soft deaths do I know

  in imagining he might perish.

  But this brings not the greatest harm, in honesty�
��

  to be embattled by so many menaces;

  another must I fear with more intensity:

  To think—O my soul is so perfidious!—

  that he could at any moment murder me,

  to whom I’ve so oft made my life the gift …

  FOUR-YEAR FAST

  The cart lurched up the track and away from Panoayan. A last shred of pride kept me from turning back and begging to be allowed to stay. I rode beside the muleteer, my back straight, my front crumbling.

  One driver, three mules, a burro and a girl. I hardly recall a single feature of the roadside. Knowing I spoke Nahuatl, the driver asked me a polite question or two, to which I replied in monosyllables, hard as these had been for me to manage lately.

  The one ray of light to reach through the clouds and down to me on that cart seat was that it was not the same muleskinner, drunk on pulque, who had driven us from Nepantla five years back, madly bawling away and singing. And vomiting. He had his way of making the Rabbit sacred. Mine was to work myself into an unholy fury: I was homesick. I’d been away less than an hour.

  Away an hour and already so much to be thankful for. It was a different driver. No one saw me cry. And I didn’t vomit. But then, riddles were a cure for seasickness, weren’t they, and I now had a riddle to cross oceans with. For what a sight my ungrateful tears would have made—hadn’t I demanded this very thing? Had I not vowed to Isabel that I would disguise myself as a boy and go to the Royal University? I would find my own teacher. Take classes! And among the towering racks of the New World’s greatest library, stroll forever. This was what adventurers did—pursued their destiny, defied the risks, strove towards high exploits like giants storming heaven.22 But with Amanda.

  Not like this.