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brjoel · 4 years ago

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The Cycle of Wheat

Soon after the mysterious arrival of its new inhabitant, new seeds were sowed in the garden of Wittgenstein’s house. The fields grew quickly, the grass became tall and bushy, and then its fresh green colour began to fade. Soon the house could no longer be seen from the street. The fields that surrounded it were golden yellow, wheat clogged tracts. [1] The house showed no other signs of life, no one ever seemed to arrive or leave, there was no movement save the soft sway of the wheat crowning its walls.

———

In summer, I watched from my window across the street as the wheat was cut and carried into the house in bundles. The house showed its face once again, and I was eager to see its familiar form.

As evening came, I watched a man exit the house through an inconspicuous door in the outer wall, an athletic figure in a white tracksuit who quickly turned and ran off.

What attracts most is the unknown. [2] Where there had long been a dark spot in the city’s night, the house now was a beacon of light. Those who found themselves lost and alone in the street gladly accepted the house’s invitation, and I watched as, in the darkness, a crowd gathered. I watched as they passed through the open gates, up the stairs, and disappeared into the house.

The Unswept Floor

The next day I was summoned to the house. I was received at the small door in the outer wall, led through the cellars, and up into the belly of the house. There was a smell of sweat, smoke, and perfume in the air. As I stepped on to the landing something crunched under my shoe. A few stalks of wheat lay beneath my feet, and more was strewn about the stone floor, next to food crumbs, scattered objects and items of clothing. The whole of this […] stricken interior bore traces of having been overturned. [3]

I was led through another door. The room I was brought into came as more of a shock than all this upheaval. It was a large, elliptical space, which the house somehow accommodated within its cubic volumes and between its perfect, planar surfaces. The floor was lowered, so that you stepped down and into the room from the threshold, and covered in a thick layer of straw that totally obscured the surface beneath. From this tangled golden carpet rose the wall in a single smooth curve and seemed not to end.

I was so trapped in my surprise that some seconds passed before I noticed the figure standing in the middle of the room. It was Lenny Belardo, Pope Pius XIII. He looked at me with his pale blue eyes, grazing my cheek with his long white fingers. [4]

—Her priests have violated my law, and have profaned mine holy things: they have put no difference between the holy and profane, neither have they shewed difference between the unclean and the clean, […] and I am profaned among them. [5] I want this mess gone, and I want its very existence to remain unknown. [6] One more thing: other than that I should summon you, Do not enter here, you will profane this place, or sully yourself. [7]

He turned his back to leave, and I blurted out a burning question.

—Why such a profound mystery? [8]

—Christ's Ascension into heaven, whereby He withdrew His bodily presence from us, was more profitable for us than His bodily presence would have been. [9] That is the only way great love stories are born. [10]

Open Reliquaries

I began to clean. I gathered the wheat and carried it away in baskets. I swept up nut shells, fruit peels, scraps of paper, ash, hair and dust. I scrubbed the stains out of the floor as best I could. Marks left on the walls, undefined stains, messages written in marker pen — If you want to save yourself, take risks [11] — I painted over in white. The tones never quite matched, the house’s age left its own colours, patches and cracks. A hundred years is youth in a church and age in a house. [12]

I picked up the relics of the last night: paintings, drawings, statuettes, waxworks […], gold weights, the woodwork of an altar, jewels, boxes and sacks with ultramarine, sulfur, quicksilver, and smalt […]; ivory boxes, mirrors […], a pair of compasses, a square, and a ruler; shells, medals, a leopards skin […], plaster models (e.g. of hands, feet, and breast), maps, and 71 books. [13] I took these things into the next room, where behind heavy steel doors I found bare rooms and cupboards, and stowed each one. The house resisted as I pushed the doors closed, but after considerable force they snapped shut.

———

After that day, the house showed a fresh face, and it surrounded itself with bushy green fields. But the colour faded, and the house again began to disappear behind tall stalks of golden wheat. The next summer arrived, and I watched once again as the wheat was cut and carried into the house in bundles. And when even was come, [I watched as Lenny] went out of the city. [14] I watched as the house revealed its face, watched as the crowd gathered in the house’s inviting glow, then passed through the gates, up the stairs, and disappeared into the house. And the next day I waited for my summons, and went to set the house in order.

After our first meeting, the Pope never showed himself to me again. I abided by his word, and for years I never joined the crowds that gathered. But I felt a growing loneliness, and I sated it with increasing attention to the relics I found. Each historian traces, to some extent, the particular feature which pleases him amid this pell mell. [15] I felt like a historian in reverse, and I hid the traces of each night.

The house celebrated the life that had entered it, and fought me at every step. Where I painted over writings and drawings on the wall, I would return to find the paint peeling off. Where I stashed the relics of each night, the house would violently throw open its doors, and the relics, so densely layered, would spill to the floor with a crash of breaking porcelain and tearing paper. To make or to destroy, it is all one to him; change is what he seeks, and all change involves action. [16]

The Threshing Floor

We all want to see that which is hidden, we all want to stare the forbidden in the face. [17] One year I could not hold myself any longer. I watched as the wheat was cut, I watched as Lenny left the house, I watched as the house beamed its invitation into the night, and I put on my shoes and went out into the street to join the crowd that had gathered.

I saw a voluptuous woman, naked and fleshless […] I saw a miser, stiff in the stiffness of death […] I saw a proud man with a devil clinging to his shoulders […] a man and a woman clutching each other by the hair […] The whole population of the nether world seemed to have gathered to act as vestibule. [18]

They gazed expectantly up at the house, and spoke:

—Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble [19]

I found my voice joining the chorus:

—I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top [20]

There was a woman who took the first step, and her movement pulled the crowd with her. They approached the open gate, and I moved with them. There was no rush, no impatience, they passed through one by one, walked up the stairs, across the freshly cut field, through the front door and into the house. I followed them to the elliptical room.

The floor was laid out with a thick covering of wheat. The woman stepped on to it with her bare feet and began to thresh, stamping heavily. She turned, and she saw us standing hesitant in the threshold, and she called out to us.

—Abandon your proud, slow yielding resistance. [21] If the body finds relief in lamentations, let it; if it wants to toss about, let it writhe and contort as much as it likes; if the body believes that some of the pain can be driven off as vapour by forcing out our cries […] just let it shout out. [22]

I stepped out of my shoes and down into the room. It was as if my feet pressed against something as elastic as air or water, which was in this case unyielding to my weight. [23] I was swept up in the movement, chaotic and uniform. The at first cacophonous noise, bouncing off the walls in an endless echo, settled into a steady rhythm.

The woman was part of the movement but also its static centre. She saw all of us, she touched us, embraced us, kissed us, washed us, and poured her precious perfume on our heads. And she felt so virtuous for the free gift she made of herself, and so uplifted. [24] And I asked myself, frightened and rapt, who was she who rose before me like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, radiant as the sun, […] terrible as an army with banners? [25]

I saw her pale blue eyes, and I recognised her. What a change did I discover in [t]his person! [26] She was Lenny, differing only in gender, [27] two natures in one Person. [28] Then the house dropped a veil over us, and no more distinctions were possible. We felt this fabric forming around [ourselves]: this invisible veil […] this laminated corridor between the skin and things, stretch out, unfold, spread, exhibit and flatten it. [29]

In this heaving turmoil I found another woman, but this time it was the whore of Babylon. I was not so much struck by her form as by the thought that she, too, was a woman like the other, and yet this one was the vessel of every vice, whereas the other was the receptacle of every virtue. But the forms were womanly in both cases, and at a certain point I could no longer understand what distinguished them. [30] Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet. [31]

The bare rubbing of […] bodies violently one upon another, produces heat, [32] and the veil swelled and, carried by the hot air, formed a dome above our heads, floating upwards. Our gaze followed it, and landed on the only solid figure in all this upheaval: on Lenny, Lenny the Pope, bathed in the morning sun, with a whip in his right hand.

—Remove yourself [33]

He cried with a loud voice […] And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom. [34]

We fled, for [we] feared him, because all the people was astonished at his doctrine. [35] We fled the house, barefooted, and the stubble of the wheat field pricked and cut at our feet.

A Shrine to Our Dancing Bodies

I was summoned to the house a few hours later. I was led into the familiar room, fearful that Lenny might appear again. He forbade me his presence. [36]

I gathered the straw from the threshing floor. I picked up the relics of the last night and carried them into the next room. The house had once again thrown open its doors and the contents of the reliquaries were spilled out in proud display.

Between two open doors I found an image sketched on the wall. Naked bodies, exposed by centuries of painting, are not aimed at voyeurs, but reveal what belongs to the realm of the senses. [37] Paint roller already in hand, I hesitated. There are still some traces of heat and emotion after the fever. [38]

The workman cannot alter his materials [39] but I allow myself to discover something new, to alter, to reject. [40] I dropped the paint roller, and instead reached for the objects that lay scattered on the floor. In each thing I touched, I searched for the bodies I had felt in the dance. Individual figures detach themselves from their material matrix. [41] I reordered them, piled them up at the foot of the painting, placed them in relation to other figures within the same image. [42] It is an assemblage that includes, but is not limited to the painting. Relics, reliquaries, celestial vault, and viewer are all intricately implicated. [43]

I step back. This, then, is our story, and after the substance naught abideth but the trace. [44]

1 Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology 2 Harrison Wood Gaiger, Art in Theory 1648 1815 3 Hugo, Les Miserables 4 Eco, The Name of the Rose 5 Ezekiel 22:26, KJV 6 Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology 7 Serres, The Five Senses 8 Rousseau, Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 9 Aquinas, Summa Theologica 10 The Young Pope 11 Serres, The Five Senses 12 Hugo, Les Miserables 13 Rijks, Catalysts of Knowledge 14 Mark 11:119, KJV 15 Hugo, Les Miserables 16 Rousseau, Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 17 The Young Pope 18 Eco, The Name of the Rose 19 Psalms 102:1-2, KJV 20 Psalms 102:6-7, KJV 21 Ovid, Metamorphoses 22 de Montaigne, The Complete Essays 23 Blacklock, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension 24 Eco, The Name of the Rose 25 Eco, The Name of the Rose 26 Rousseau, Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 27 Aquinas, Summa Theologica 28 Aquinas, Summa Theologica 29 Serres, The Five Senses 30 Eco, The Name of the Rose 31 Proust, In Search of Lost Time Vol V The Captive The Fugitive 32 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 33 Ovid, Metamorphoses 34 Mark 15:37-38, KJV 35 Mark 11:18, KJV 36 Rousseau, Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 37 Serres, The Five Senses 38 de Montaigne, The Complete Essays 39 Seneca, Complete Works 40 Seneca, Complete Works 41 Freedberg, The Power of Images 42 Freedberg, The Power of Images 43 Payne, Renaissance and Baroque Architecture 44 The Book of the Thousand and One Nights

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