Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Deep Magic From Before the Dawn of Time

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       This is a longer essay I wrote several years ago, which I am posting in installments

  Part I The Magic Kingdom I–The Varieties of Magic
Part II The Magic Worlds of Art and Nature.    

 But the magic of nature pales before the deep magic from the dawn of time.
               I was first struck by its wonder in a train racing through the Indian countryside when I was about ten.  We’d left with our mother to visit her parents in Bombay with the usual flurry and battles about what to pack during which the cook left without carrying the suitcases to the car, and my father carried them.  “Look at the veins bulge on his forehead,” my mother said. “Oh, Pa’s heart; he will die before we reach Bombay.”  The premature death of my father, who was in his late forties when we were born, was an omnipresent specter.
               There were just two people whom I deeply loved then, my father, and an Irish nun at my Catholic boarding school, Sister Josephine, who had “adopted” me, and loved me tenderly, choosing poetry and classics for me to read, discussing literature and theology with me, forcing me to repeatedly recite my elocution pieces to her to master public speaking, and who once claimed with some hubris, “Whatever you are, I’ve made you.”  So I prayed frantically, fearfully, that my father would not die. 
               The astounding, magical premise of prayer then struck me for the first time: that I could sit in a train and think, and a good and mighty God would know exactly what I was thinking, and might give me something just because I asked him to.  I experimentally thought something.  God knew it.  I thought something else.  God knew that too.  And, at the same moment, he knew what the billion other people on the planet were thinking at that very moment.  All through the two day journey, I marveled at that: “You perceive my thoughts from afar.”  If the one who merely asked, received, well then, that was deep magic.  I believed it, I hardly dared believe it, I prayed desperately that my father would not die. (My father, incidentally, is now 87. )  
               “Give me a lever long enough, and I can move the world.”  As a child, that apothegm of Archimedes, like many adult sayings, felt nice-sounding but meaningless.  Actually, that lever, , is prayer.  Ironically, the first “mountain” I moved by prayer was also the largest.  Is “use it or lose it,” “risk or rust” the rule for the muscles of faith as for those of brain and body?
               Restless and bored after my abortive novitiate at Mother Teresa’s convent, soon after graduating from school at 16, I now decided to go to college overseas, and spent a few hours in the libraries of the British Council and the USIS, researching universities in America, England, and even Australia and Canada.  Before I wrote to request application material, however, one odd evening, I heard a quiet, clear voice within me say, “Apply to Oxford.”  I recognized the voice.  “Okay, Lord,” I said, somewhat stunned, “Oxford and Cambridge;” (my first cousin, now my husband, was then at Cambridge.)  “No, just Oxford,” the voice replied.
               Well!  Less than a percent of the far better prepared British population got into Oxford University, I discovered.  It  had two fee structures, modest for British citizens, and exorbitant for overseas students.  And even were I to get in, and find money, I still needed to get permission from the Reserve Bank of India to buy scarce foreign exchange from it, and this was hard to get, especially to study the Arts overseas.  I decided to study English Literature, and, eventually, become a writer.
               One can proceed with doubt and trembling despite a clear directive. But I did proceed–applied to Oxford, wrote my admission essays on Much Ado about Nothing and Marlowe’s Edward II and waited with hope and prayer and anxious impatience.  One heady evening, I opened a letter with an Oxford postmark to find that, incredibly, I had indeed “got in.”  But, as of then, without a scholarship.
               The tuition, a quarter of a million Indian rupees, could buy me an apartment in Bombay, India’s most expensive city, my grandmother, who lived there, repeated ruefully; “you are the kind of fool who goes to Oxford,” she added.  I had prayed before; I prayed desperately now (working out a schedule of prayer seven times a day, like the Psalmist; what’s good enough for him…).  Faith can make of life a fairy tale, but most of a fairy tale, remember, is agonizing; adversity upon adversity, you almost don’t want to continue reading.  But I did continue praying, and money did continue coming in: the Radhakrishnan scholarship for Indians to study anything at Oxford; an Eckersley Foundation grant for anyone to study English at Oxford; interest-free loans from relatives.  One day–after minor miracles–I declared, “I could trust God for ten thousand rupees, but I need a hundred thousand.”  If the fairy tale is God’s favorite genre, irony is a favorite literary device.  That day, along with the award letter, a scholarship check for ten thousand rupees arrived in the mail from an Indian foundation I’d applied to.  “I wish I’d said, ‘I could trust God for a hundred thousand rupees,’” I said mournfully.  Anyway, in drops or showers, all the money I needed came to me.  Even my thousand pound deposit which came due before I got my Reserve Bank permit to convert rupees to pounds was improbably paid by an uncle’s friend in America.  A relative who had impetuously resigned from the Reserve Bank of India in Bombay, went with me to his former subordinates to get the rare, coveted permit.  And the years at Oxford were a happy period of intense growth that, in many ways, made me a different person.         



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Japan’s formal, ritual apology

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 Tepco Officials formally apologize for the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daichi.


Japan must be the most fascinating country in the world. It has these formal stylized rituals which are almost medieval. See the formal, ritualized apology of the Tepco officials for the nuclear disaster.


Of course, they were not responsible for a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, though it is surprising that their nuclear contingency plans did not account for it. 
                                                                              * * *


My father, a Chartered Accountant, who worked at Tatas, India’s largest steel company, was responsible for bringing in the first computers to Tatas. His official designation was “Controller of Accounts, and Manager of Data Processing.” He frequently travelled to Japan and Pittsburg, as well as Europe. 


Japan’s mixture of refined aesthetics, practical ingenuity, discipline, and a society totally opaque to the foreigner fascinated him, and my chess-loving husband too, who bravely did his final year of school in Japan, in a Japanese medium school to improve his Go. (That’s another story!). 


I was fascinated by Japan, the politeness and decency of the people, and its sheer impenetrability and opacity to the foreigner. I felt I would never really understand these people, and what makes them tick.


But it is a wonderful honourable culture, isn’t it?
                                                                                  * * * 


Interestingly, if honour and saving face weren’t so important, I wonder if they would have been more forthcoming about the disaster.


I am troubled about their kamikaze exposure of their workers to what is potentially “lethal” doses of radiation according to Jazko’s testimony to Congress. They have officially reported 20 to the IAEA as having radiation contamination.


 I wonder what the US would have done? Would she have sent workers in knowing that they would be very likely to die. Or ? Evacuate the environs and declare it a wasteland? However, evacuating Tokyo, where a quarter of the country’s population live , 150 miles away from Fukushima is probably unthinkable for the economy. 


Every so often, in the lives of nations as in individual lives, we come to the limits of what human intelligence, ingenuity and discipline can accomplish. I wonder if we are seeing that in Fukushima.

The Ancient Primal Cry, ” Why?”

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Japan aftermath: A man cries next to his destroyed house in the rubble in Onagawa


 A man cries next to his destroyed house in Onagawa, where his mother is still buried in the rubble h/t The Guardian


Sometimes, a picture gets you more than a thousand words.


Looking at this Japanese man in the snow, crying for his mother, his destroyed house and his lost life, 


you cannot help echoing one of the ancient primal cries of all creation,


“Why?”
                                                                       * * * 


On other days, however, in other circumstances, Creation, of course, sings a different song, no less ancient, no less primal. And the refrain of that song is just as mysterious:


“Glory.”

I Arise Today–The Prayer of St. Patrick

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I arise today
Through the strength of heaven;
Light of the sun,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of the wind,
Depth of the sea,
Stability of the earth,
Firmness of the rock.
I arise today
Through God’s strength to pilot me;
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s way to lie before me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s hosts to save me
Afar and anear,
Alone or in a mulitude.
Christ shield me today
Against wounding
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye that sees me,
Christ in the ear that hears me.
I arise today
Through the mighty strength
Of the Lord of creation

The Magic Kingdom II–Art and Nature

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This is a longer essay I wrote a few years ago, which I am posting in installments
  Part I The Magic Kingdom I–The Varieties of Magic

The secret life within paintings brought me back to life when I was depressed that so little writing got done in the maelstrom of life with my exuberant children who, with their toys and friends, daily whirled through the house, disorder in their wake, and considered bedtime a signal for the party to begin.  Whenever we had frequent flier miles or my husband an invitation to speak at conferences near them, we visited great museums.  In those magic kingdoms–cool shadowy galleries full of pure, concentrated loveliness: the Louvre, Prado, Uffizi, Vatican, Rijksmuseum, I felt most alive and peaceful, the brightness and beauty subtly feeding my soul which I could feel spring back to life like the indomitable trodden Thomasinni crocus in our lawn.
               Each exhibition, a bottle from an ancient shore, bore a scrolled message: comfort or hope, inspiration or joy.  The Monet retrospective at the Art Institute at Chicago: the romance of the artist, persisting, developing his craft–over seventy working years–from the undistinguished paintings of his twenties to these rooms full of the colors of magic, white and silver light, bright greens and blues, lilies in shimmering water, and, everywhere, the quiet glory of flowers.  Miro painted the gay, faux naif paintings in the retrospective at the Met until he died at 90, still fresh and green, still bearing fruit.  Art as a staff, adding happiness and excitement to life despite its tumults, and helping you forget them.  The startling, eccentric sculptures in alabaster or veined marble in the Brancusi retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art created right into old age by a man who joyfully woke at 5 a.m. to start creating reminded me of the pleasure and great good fortune it is to make beautiful things.  And the paintings in the rare Vermeer retrospective at the National Gallery breathed peace, the deep peace possible as one goes about the domestic chores that harassed me .
               In intense, blissful concentration at those galleries, I shed myself, becoming “only an eye” (as Cezanne disparagingly said of Monet) and shed time, losing track of it, as when I read, write, hike, garden, pray, study scripture, walk by the sea; (if it helps me lose track of time, it’s probably worth doing!)  I felt again the joy of beauty; I longed to get back home and get writing.
               My older daughter, Zoe, who, from infancy, ensconced in a backpack, stared at art over her father’s shoulder, responded to it early.  She startled us by laughing and clapping at bright paintings when she was seven months old, and reaching out, with delight, to sculpture, especially of children, as a toddler (and has since won several art prizes!)  Every time my youngest daughter Irene entered an art gallery, however, she howled.  Those intense vacations amid the museums, romanesque monasteries, Gothic spires and ancient gardens of France, Italy, Spain, and Holland, when at the work of man’s hands I sung for joy were endangered.  The force of childish discontent drove us into another world for refreshment: the work of His hands.
               And the natural world–with its starbursts of serendipity–is where I increasingly found magic: wonder, awe, astonishment and sheer beauty.  We walked one hot summer day on Jekyll Island off the Georgia coast, hunting for sea turtles, watching pelicans migrate, when suddenly–a splash,  a flipper–a dolphin arced out of the ocean. A love-gift!  For several enchanted minutes, we watched the shoal pass, intermittently hurling themselves into the air  in wild animal joy.
               As I drive to the beach, watching the sky slowly flush pink and peach, and then walk there amid the immensity of the sky, the immensity of the sea, and its ceaseless murmur, I sense this world is indeed God-veined, and throbs with the glory of Him “whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky” and the hills alive with invisible horses and chariots of fire. 

The Magic Kingdom–I

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Wren-tit


Hello readers, I had written a long essay called The Magic Kingdom in 2003, and then we moved from the US to the UK, and I never did anything with it. Perhaps I will expand it. Anyway, I am going to post it here over a few days in blog sized bites in the hope that you might fit it interesting.
Comments welcomed

THE MAGIC KINGDOM
           
            In No Strange Land
O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee.
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air–
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!–
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places;
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.
But, when so sad thou canst not sadder,
Cry;–and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s lader
Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry,–clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames.                                          Francis Thompson
“I’m the President of the Soviet Union, but I cannot enjoy the birthright of every American child; I cannot go to Disneyland,” Michal Gorbachev lamented in Time.  When, by virtue of geographical accident, my husband Roy and I produced little Americans, we reluctantly, foolishly, felt we should give them a shot at this birthright.
               It’s the happiest place on earth: the theme song bounced through the Magic Kingdom.  Stoic, serpentine lines waited 75 glum minutes for a 90 second ride.  In elbow-jostling stores, discontented children in a fever of desire coveted, pleaded, got, coveted some more.  Our three year old, Irene, acquired her first Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt in a moment of rapture.  She beamed beneath her halo of curls, and toddled out, radiating delight.  And then turned, ah fatal turning, a still pillar.   “I don’t have very many Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirts,” she said.  Now sadness veiled that plump face.  “How many Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirts do you want, Irene?” I sighed.  “Four,” she said. 
               Walt Disney coined the phrase “amusement park,” literally, a place without musing, without thought, an escape from one’s life into hyper-reality, a third degree of separation, riding rides based on movies, based on books.  And, everywhere, contrasts: the determined hilarity of the M.B.A.’s and the strained faces rushing to see it all, which insidiously becomes the objective rather than enjoying each other in/and the Magic Kingdom.  Exasperated at their kids for not being happy despite the piratical tickets, parents growl; overwhelmed little ones burst into tears.  People line up two hours early for a parade in honor of Mickey Mouse!  I ruefully thought  of Arnold’s plaint a century ago, “the strange disease of modern life, which, though it gives no peace, yet spoils for rest.”
               The next day, to recover from that wearing magic, we hiked in the Topanga Canyon State Park outside Los Angeles, hoping to add to our life-list the small, secretive wren-tit, “the voice of the chaparral,” often heard, rarely seen, reversing the old definition of a good child.  All day we heard its lovely, liquid song rise into a trill: “peep peep peep-peepeepepeprrr.”  We stalked it, and stalked it, as noiselessly as our two children could stand, but the rustling chaparral betrayed us, and we heard fainter rustles as it hopped away, luring us on.  This was magic, I realized: the high clear notes of this invisible bird floating on the winter air.  The work of his hands! Since I grew up in India, where nature was a matter of sweat, heat, dust, mosquitoes, and monsoons, something to be outwitted, I discovered its nourishment circuitously.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

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The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?


Mary Oliver