Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

The only Astingi shrine equipment consisted of unpainted biconical vases of local materials. While their now extinct neighbors had embarked upon an orgy of glazes and dyes, ransoming themselves to the markets of the trading routes, their ceramics remained severe as a note struck with a mallet, grouped together in the air, forest glen, cave, or vitrine, in no apparent order or necessary number, the new mixed with the old, unclear as to their original purpose — perhaps simply an object to gently remind one of one’s heretic self. (And that the self, too, is a perishable sort of commodity with shifting value; we appear on earth only for a second, while even our rudest utensil outlives us.)

So if Mother had a theogony, it would boil down to something like this: the long-term consists of a great number of short-terms, and truth, like the vases, can only be beheld as a somewhat manufactured and random entity. All creation is hybrid, no one is really chosen by anyone, there is no direct line of development, so the best one can hope for is to string together a medley of old favorites and new quirks, a genuine confusion of the higher and the lower — an arbitrary grouping of somewhat bedraggled epiphanies, each propping the other up — and this was just the sort of thing, a kind of music-hall review, which ought to be worshiped. It is wrong to use punishment in another world as a threat, because the world of punishment is in this one for each of us. The world is mostly inertia, where all the best-intentioned nurturing does not guarantee as much as a burp. Only the present is divine, and the fairest order a heap of random sweepings. The Goddess’s job is, after all, to turn the prayer into a blessing. And what is the prayer? “More life!” That is the prayer. Always, more life. And what is the blessing? “More life! This life!” So you can see there was nothing in the least mystical in our worship of her.

Naturally I came to see my mother as a kind of work of art, no matter how strongly this was at odds with her own tastes. Just as my father had been put on this earth to take exception as a non-conformist, she was here to attest that the conventional wisdom of the herd is also deserving of representation. For if the key to life is only in resisting the herd, how can you learn to love? Mother, I suppose, played the Catholic to my father’s Pro test ant materialism, if for no other reason than the rules of the primitive matriarchy always gave the church pride of place. I never saw her near the prayer station in the corner of her suite with the chamber pot beneath, atomizers of cologne, earrings, and her favorite clepsydra (water clock) upon the altar. Nor as far as I know did she ever attend a mass. But a visit to the chapter house of the great cathedral at Razacanum would show every other face in its gallery of archbishops to be of Priam’s family. And yet a hundred years before, they had all been Protestants. One tends to forget that the Church was the most democratic institution of that time, offering advancement upon merit to the poorest man, and only in finance were there men more obscure and lowly. There seemed to be, at any rate, no hiatus in her adoptive paternal lineage, no waffling or skepticism; only conversion or reconversion. Her ancestors had gone from animal worship to pyrolatry to Catholicism to Protestantism and back to Catholicism, and in the section of her orbit in which I was acquainted with her, she was veering, come full circle from a lapsed high church infatuate back to a lush and goofy heterodoxy, her mysterious Naiad side, in which the point, apparently, was to be your own ancestor.

Our Christmases were thrilling; we gave presents on the twenty-first, the Solstice, the day of the unconquered sun, wore crowns of the Saxon holly and ivy while chanting the pagan Dies sol invictus with unremitting jollity. And if the choristers were out of tune or mumbling the words, Ainoha would give the conductor a consoling smile. Then we lit a huge bonfire on the front lawn, sacrificing the insipid pine to Odin’s sacred oak, put human masks on all the dogs, their snouts upon us. There followed twelve days of fasting and mourning, celebrating something much older and stranger than the birth of “ that man,” in my father’s scornful mention, “who never wrote a single word.” I could forgive Christianity its fanaticism; it was its skepticism permeating everything that set me against it. As the Astingi know, there is nothing more amusing than playing pagans in Purgatorio.

I shouldn’t leave the impression that Mother wasn’t maternal. It was only that her sensual self was so powerful, that it told her that she couldn’t protect us from the world, even for a day, as much as we all wanted to believe in her semi-divinity. So it was that she continuously pushed both my father and myself out from the Land Behind the Forest. After a hug, she submerged her instincts, renounced her status, and even in our most desperate moments turned us round face-out to the world. She wasn’t cold or diffident. It was simply a kind of reversal of the sexual. She just announced, as she had in her first labor pains, “ That way!”

Like everything else in our world, I would not understand this until I saw the drama reenacted by beasts. In late January, the four brooks from the four valleys froze solid, the spider’s web of haze which hung over Semper Vero snapped, and blizzards stunned even the moles and beavers into inanimate submission. From my tower window, I could see the huddled aurochs up to their knees in the drifts, every curl on their faces blasted with frost, every breath turned into a small geyser. Their heavy heads and thickened necks were perfectly suited for smashing through the crust of ice and foraging for tufts of brown grass. At that time of year, the only sound beyond the wind was these animals’ labored breathing. The calves milled around their mothers, trying to share in the patch of grass they had just stamped out of the snow. But the females, already carrying next year’s calves, simply butted them away, telling them in effect to dig their own. The thaws gave up the ribcages of those who didn’t, not always the weakest by any means. And the mothers would mourn them, browsing around the skeletons and chasing away the foxes.

It made me feel like the luckiest man alive.

Semper Vero was of course Ainoha’s adoptive family’s, owing to their sudden spontaneous mutation from fairly ordinary to well-off folk, the odds on which my father never failed to believe he could capitalize and securitize. And she encouraged him in this, though she suspected he was doomed to failure. Priam’s relations had led the Russians through the Pass at Cjank (the officers bivouacking at Semper Vero) on their way to crushing the revolutions of 1848—though the family had also provided arms to innumerable failed peasant rebellions, and Mother herself would be the first to enlist against the Russians in the Great War. Though this appears contradictory (the pantheon of goddesses has always appeared rather scatterbrained), I believe there was a serious principle operating here. The most dangerous of men, after all, is the self-appointed heretic in a righteous cause, and it is the goddess’s duty, whenever such men appear, to cancel him out, and restore, by whatever necessary means, the cosmic equilibrium. The Mistress of the Living, Mistress of the Dead, fights on the side of those she personally likes, regardless of their politics. For her, the divine was just another category of human thought. And as worshipers of the ditch know, survival is insured only if a little bit of every thing is thrown into the burial pit, as we never know how the story is going to come out. The history that the goddess sets herself in favor of is simply that long struggle of people who want nothing more than to lead ordinary lives, but who are manipulated into conflicts by men who know no peace.