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The Quantity of a Hazelnut
By Fae Malania Church Publishing, Incorporated
Copyright © 2005 Fae Malania
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59627-154-8
CHAPTER 1
I HAD AN AWFUL dream once, it was a terrible dream, terrible things happened in it. There wasn't any future in my dream. It was all gone, lost, irretrievable; and by my fault, by my own fault.
At the deepest point of my despair, in the twinkling of an eye—though nothing was changed—everything was changed. I was holding—something—in the curve of my palm. Its weight was good to the hand, it was very solid, round. It might have been an apple, or a globe. It was all that mattered, and in it was everything. Even in my sleep, I think I cried for joy.
A long time later, in the Revelations of Dame Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century English anchoress, I met my dream again, and I knew it at once.
"In this," she says (this vision or, as she always calls it, shewing)—"In this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my understanding it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon and thought: 'What may this be?' And I was answered in a general way, thus: 'It is all that is made.' I marvelled how it could last, for methought it might fall suddenly to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: 'It lasts and ever shall last because God loves it, and so hath all-thing its being through the love of God.'"
This is the day which the LORD hath made: we will rejoice and be glad in it.
I TRY TO MAKE a practice of saying this verse as soon as I wake up, to remind me. Only I have a tendency to answer back. Like "I wouldn't mind rejoicing so much if they'd just let me stay in bed." Or—this morning—"Rejoice and be glad in this, what are they talking about?" (Note how the old gods linger, in that "they"—or the Fates or the Furies, or whoever they are.)
It was raining this morning. Well, not just raining. It was trying, with a sort of dull, mindless determination, to blot out the world once and for all. It's still raining. All last night, all day today, where will it end—a steady, meaningless, uninterrupted, unvarying, uninflected drench, as if automation had now turned up in nature, to throw individual raindrops out of work.
Rejoice? Oh, I just hate it!
However, let's see now. There's been a drought, and I do care about the food supply, don't I, and the farmers, and the reservoirs? But the farms are mostly in the next county, and the reservoirs are upstate, so why doesn't the rain ... ? Then can't I summon up a fellow creaturely feeling for the thirsty blades of grass in my own front lawn? Yes, but after all, it rained all night!
I'll never get anywhere like this, trying to aim a theoretical good will at the crops in order to avoid thinking about the rain. What I have to rejoice in—to love and be glad in—is, exactly, the rain. Because the Lord hath made it, and there it is.
O ye Heavens, bless ye the Lord. O ye Waters, O ye Showers, O ye Winds of God, bless ye the Lord. Praise him and magnify him forever. Is that what it's doing? Why, yes. I'm the one who's out of tune. My song of praise is full of footnotes claiming exemptions.
This is the world which the Lord hath made, and all his works bless him at every heartbeat of creation, just by being. In the interest of accuracy, I must at least learn to see straight.
When I can see what is really there, as it is in very Truth, as his hands made it and his eyes see it, then—ah, then! Love will come singing, rejoicing, and being glad.
UNTIL LAWRENCE OF ARABIA I had never actually seen a camel.
Of course I've seen plenty of them processing across Christmas cards, standing around on cigarette packages, sulking in zoos despising their surroundings. The way they look is both laughable and unsympathetic, and suggests that they don't know how to enjoy themselves.
And I've read about them. They are morose, disagreeable, and unloving. They bite their masters. They have neither the generosity to make the best of their lot nor the spirit to put up a really good fight against it. Spiritually speaking, the camel is a total loss.
He is, in fact, a disconcerting reminder of that chilling old theory that God made the world and everything in it for the use of man, and for nothing else whatever. Could God have done such an awful thing? Could he have breathed life into even one creature who is—in himself, for himself—just nothing at all? Created a conscious being to live a life of joyless utility, to be a tool, a convenience, an object? It doesn't bear thinking about.
But now I've really seen a camel.
I've heard one, too—in fact, a whole caravan of them. In the morning when the camp begins to wake, they lift up their voices and greet the day, groaning, bellowing, yawping one after another until the desert roars with a glorious, blaring cacophony. Maybe it's complaint, but there's nothing mean or petty about it. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what brought down the walls of Jericho.
But to really see the camel, you have to see him running. When he walks, lurching and swaying, rolling and pitching, you would think each muscle was headed in a different direction. When he begins to run he's like one of those heavy, ungainly birds who can hardly get off the ground—but when they do, they own the whole wide sky.
Given time enough and desert enough, he manages to get his ramshackle collection of bones all moving together, he picks up speed, stretches out longer and longer, and then ... now, there is a camel! At full gallop, his neck way out ahead of him, his whole fantastic shape a bewilderment of undulations, fast, powerful, free as a desert storm, he's wild and weird and gorgeous beyond belief, an authentic aboriginal marvel. The whole wide ocean of sand is his; he owns it.
Compared to the camel, the horse is an oversimplification.
Who would ask of such a lord of life that he also cultivate an amiable personality?
I DON'T KNOW MUCH about music, but I know what I like. Why can't I say even that much about people? The attention I pay to the Brahms Violin Concerto far surpasses in quality what I give to any human being whomsoever, friend or foe. The concerto is easier, true. But a certain real effort is required, and I do make it—not always, but fairly often.
I settle myself quietly; empty myself of all extraneous thoughts, impressions, emotions; withdraw my attention from all outside sights, sounds, and concepts; and I listen. I turn my whole self to the music like radar; I become a receiver, percipient, minutely alive. I follow in busy quietude the shape of the music as its structure builds in my mind. I say nothing about it to myself, I am for this little space of time a pure act of listening.
I am not simple enough to be very good at this, nor do I have the musical education to hear all there is to be heard. But each time I listen I hear more, and more acutely.
This is surely the clue to the kind of attention I owe to people. I must empty my mind of other claims and, in interior silence, let them tell me who they are. I must remain in watchful, active quiet as the basic architecture of a personality presents itself to my mind. I must learn to hear a slight variation on a theme, a modulation to another key, an inner melody, a discord, an individual beauty of tone.
If love isn't this, it can't be much.
But the minute the note of another human being begins to sound, my self leaps up in clamant alarm and yells: "What about me? I'm here too!" In the ensuing din, I can't hear a thing.
I have a great deal to learn about the virtue of silence. I wish I could be quiet long enough to figure out how to begin.
PONDERING ON THE nature of contemplation, I have been led to think of my great-grandmother. I don't remember what she looked like, I have never seen a picture of her, I don't remember anyone ever telling me anything about her; and she died, so far as I am concerned, before history began. But I remember her.
I was two (that was the year we went Back Home to visit, so it must have been then). There is nothing at all to say who the woman in my memory picture was—why couldn't she have been just any woman standing in a doorway? But I know.
I was outside the door, on the porch, looking way up at her from my thirty-three inches or so. She was inside, looking down at me, her right hand crossed over in front of her holding the screen door. She couldn't, of course, really have been holding it. In a Southern Illinois summer with a temperature of 108 degrees in the shade and flies and mosquitoes as yet unacquainted with insecticide, nobody held open screen doors. Either I had just gone out and she was closing it, or I wanted to come in and she was opening it. Or maybe she had just given me a cup of cold water from the pump at the kitchen sink. The door was about at midpoint, but I was looking up at her through the screen, not the opening.
It could have lasted no more than a flash of time (otherwise the flies would have got in), but my great-grandmother and I have had all the rest of my life to share this moment, to taste its quality, to assay its meaning. It is still in my mind, perfect, mysterious, unfathomed.
I was looking at her face through the screen, but I don't remember her face. I remember her presence, and a deep, still happiness to be in her presence. I remember the expansion of time, like a slowing of breath, so there was nothing else I had to do but look at her, and grow in the warmth of her sun. There was all the time in the world or there was no time at all any more. I was trusting and at peace, quite safe. I was entirely myself, simple in substance, of single eye, but peacefully aware of an infinite capacity.
If a moment of true communion with an ordinary, no doubt flawed, human being could be so much to me—a garden enclosed, a stilling of time and temporalities, a flowering of happiness, an intuition of infinite possibility, a secret never forgotten, never fully read.... If all this can be and remain in a moment of human communion, what must it be like to see for an instant the face of God in the shadows, behind the screen? To stand in his presence in still and motionless joy, and know the warmth and shining of his sun?
I keep all these things and ponder them in my heart.
ON MY DINING room table, at the moment, is the magazine section of the New York Post from two days ago; half the Long Island paper of the same date; my kitchen timer, put there this morning so I'd know when the eggs were done; my dark glasses; the top of a box I brought home from the bakery yesterday; a pretty little three-minute timer which I used a few minutes ago to take my temperature by (it was normal); today's mail, unopened; this week's Life; my checkbook; a checkbook filler; a letter from my mother; a note I wrote to my son three days ago when I left the house; a note he wrote to me the same day when he left the house; a cup of coffee, half full; a pencil; a swatch of fabric representing the sofa slipcover before last; the purse I was carrying yesterday, wide open; an empty gray paper bag from a bookstore; a pliofilm wrapper for a pair of white kid gloves which I wore last Thursday; an emery board; two green stamps; a bottle of pills; two foil packets of hand lotion; four flyers from a department store, advertising things I may decide to buy; a pocket edition of the Psalms, KJV; and an album of children's records which I mean to give away, as we're all grown up now.
Also on the same table, the notebook in which I write and my two elbows, supporting the hands that hold my head. What am I to make of all this? (I just took my temperature again and it is still normal; there must be something wrong with that thermometer.)
I know the solution in principle, of course. Pick up any one of these objects, and put it wherever it belongs, and then go on to the next, and so on. On a better day I suppose I could have the table clear in about ninety seconds, or three television commercials. But if this were a better day I wouldn't be telling you all this. Today, I can't. I don't know why, that's what I'm trying to explain!
My hand barely begins to reach out toward, for instance, the old newspapers. In a hideous, shivering instant I see everything on the table not as separable, manageable things over which even I might establish dominion, but as a mass, an indivisible glob of things, a surly, lifeless mob of things, a whole more incoherent than the sum of its parts. (God is Three-in-One, but the Devil's name is Legion.)
The brain-to-hand impulse is struck dead, as if by a jealous god.
I turn away and pace (you've seen tigers) to and fro in the house, walking up and down in it. The vacuum cleaner is in the middle of the living room floor. I pause. I could use it or I could put it away; but my mind is not in communication with my hand. I wheel about, my feet take me to the kitchen, where the breakfast dishes are in the sink. I cannot decide to do them, I turn again. The beds are unmade but I swing away, back to the dining room table, to the kitchen, to and fro, up and down. I am very tired, but my unconscious mind is in communication with my legs and I cannot stop. I sit down and then, without knowing how it happens, I am on my feet again, walking.
Do you see? I cannot clear the table, I cannot wash the dishes, which should I do first? Don't you see, I cannot begin. I cannot choose to begin.
Oh, how will I ever explain this to you? Let me try another way.
Over and over I have read and repeated and thought about and clung to and yearned over those words, All my fresh springs are in thee. Water, think of it, clear, sparkling, lively, springing up fresh and pure from its source deep in the earth. So all meaningful action springs from a hidden, uncorrupt source.
The mind that chooses, that forms the thought, Let this be done now, is like the mind that formed the world. Let There Be Light: and Chaos, which was not, began to be filled with all that was. There would be another day for the next step, a separate motion within the mind of God for the moon and the stars, the green herb, the beasts of the field. The mind which decides and orders and instigates has its deep springs in the mind of God.
The hand that reaches out, with knowledge and power, to pick up an old newspaper from a welter of odds and ends is an image of the hand of God. It has authority because it moves, however unknowingly, under the authority of God.
What, then, if the mind cannot choose and the hand is blind, knowing nothing, moving without power or purpose? Chaos is come again.
Chaos is nothing; is Satan. Separate objects on a table are an unintelligible jumble, because the principle of individuation is not in him. The mind cannot differentiate and choose, because in him is no order. The hand can only move blindly in the air, because he does not make, or renew, or restore, or keep, or hold. The feet can only devour the earth, because in him is neither destination nor rest.
From the spring of nothing, nothing will flow.
God, Thou God of the living and not of the dead, send my roots rain.
I SUPPOSE I'D have to say Miss Clements was ugly. It isn't a nice word, and it implies a certain crudeness of perception in the beholder. Fair enough; I was only fourteen, and not uncrude.
In the best of circumstances she could never have been more than plain. But circumstances were not the best. She had a goiter, and one eye drooped; one whole side of her face was indefinably misshapen. She wore a brown silk dress—only one, I think, in the three years I knew her—and the hem sagged. Besides, that dress was too long in the first place and anyway it had no shape—ah, here I am, starting an affectionate reminiscence of Miss Clements, and already I'm growing irritable because she didn't fix a hemline.
She used to look at me with love. Christian love. I thought at the time it was just a teacher's pet sort of thing, and made what use of it I could. She was so much under my thumb that I found myself incorporated into the very Body of Christ (she was my Sacred Studies teacher, I forgot to say).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Quantity of a Hazelnut by Fae Malania. Copyright © 2005 Fae Malania. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing, Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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