Days by Moonlight (Quincunx, #5)

by André Alexis

I’m not a mystical person, but I think of it this way: I’m drawn to flowers, herbs, and weeds, some of which I draw over and over. I feel a connection to them and, in drawing them, I allow them the place in my life they were meant to have. On the other hand, my love for plants is fairly straightforward, too. I’m attracted to their lines and curves, their structure and colour, their complex simplicity. These were the things that inspired my studies in botany, for which I’ve never had even a moment’s regret.

it’s good to remember that a place is more than earth and ground. It’s all that earth and ground make possible! All the stories and imaginings. Goethe says: ‘Wer den Dichter will verstehen muss in Dichters Lande gehen!’ If you want to understand the poet, you’ve got to go to the poet’s country. He’s not wrong, not wrong at all! But I say if you want to understand a country, then you’ve got to go to the poets and artists, to the ones who refashion the world and make it live for their fellows. And where do these poets draw their inspiration? From earth, ground, stories, dreams, language, and history. That’s what a place is, Alfie. It feeds off us while we feed off it. It’s a bit of a paradox, you know, like context giving context to a context, but there you have it.

In the end, I had no experience with separating the spirit from the thing. I wasn’t even sure what the professor meant by “spirit,” but I believed he was on to something, and it pleased me to think that one day I might understand what he was talking about.

George Coulson died in his seventies, having neither excavated the hill nor permitted anyone to do the digging for him. After his death, no one was interested in his plot of land. No one believed he’d been much more than a fanatic. So, Coulson’s Hill, which now serves as the name of a village – a crossroads, really – became something of a synonym for broken dreams, hesitation, and futility. Professor Bruno could not think of Coulson’s Hill without feeling both pity and scorn.

My own feelings were harder to pin down. I agreed it was a pity George Coulson had never learned for certain if he was meant to find more gold. But I also felt – maybe because I’d just seen my first cinqueflora – that Coulson, by refusing to dig, had kept alive the possibility of finding something precious. Despite the professor’s view, the name Coulson’s Hill struck me as hopeful, maybe even forever hopeful.

So, for practical reasons (the crowding around the till was bad for business) and for personal ones (she was exhausted by the consideration she felt obliged to show the people interested in her), Carson Michaels devised a question to ask of every suitor: what is the only object that makes me cry? She would ask the question three times. If a man or woman could not answer it by the third ask, they would find themself banished from Lee’s Garage.

He thought: no wonder memories of childhood brought her to tears. He reasoned: he could not wipe out her childhood, but he could eradicate its symbol, an act that would liberate Carson and her siblings. He resolved: to decimate the jug and surprise Carson with its fragments.

The world – people and things – brings us to love but it is not love itself. I might have said those very words about my parents and Anne, that they had brought me to love, that they were not love itself. That they were gone from me could not spoil what they’d given.

But you’ve got to understand, my boy, that in my mind and in all the work I’ve done, John Skennen is an artist and a brilliant thinker. I’d hate to have that image of him destroyed by facts. You see? The real Skennen could just as easily kill my version of him as improve it! And I don’t mind saying I think my version of the man and his work is better than any real version could be. I’m not a coward, Alfie. I can face reality. But we old people know the cost of that confrontation more than you youngsters!

My faith doesn’t always help me, said the reverend, but my reason sometimes does. I think of us as creatures who are fated to interpret. We question everything. I believe it’s our fundamental nature to question. As such, how could our Lord be anything but unknowable? If we were suddenly certain God existed, if we ceased to question God’s existence, God would cease to exist for us. Do you see what I mean?

But then why did you stop writing poetry? Judith asked. – Poetry stopped writing me, said John Stephens.

My bed was beneath the window. Just above me as I lay down, there were curtains that I pulled aside to look up at the night sky. Far above me, Ursa Major, the great bear, had begun her nightly search for her cub while, just beyond her, her child was almost encircled by the sinuous curve of the dragon, Draco. I stared at the constellations for the longest while, until it suddenly struck me that they were beautiful, that each was a story in itself, that beauty is both order and story. I’d never thought of it that way, and I wondered if this is what Professor Bruno meant when he used the word beauty. More: it occurred to me, as Ursa Minor, the cub, came to life in my imagination and fled from the dragon, that there is beauty because God or the universe or my own psyche is merciful, that beauty is compensation for the oneness I remembered but could no longer feel.

I wish you luck, he said. I was going to say it’ll be a new world for you, but the world is always new. Something is always coming or going. When I was your age, I loved the idea that artists strive to make things new. But as I’ve grown, Alfred, the thing I want is for things to stay the same, at least till we’ve had time to see them for what they are. It’s only with that kind of perspective that you can act for good in the world.

It’s because of that grieving – the trauma of it – that the Carson I love is part of who I’ve become. Do you know, I still think of her as she was when we first met. Sometimes I even feel the feelings I had for her. That’s the thing about grief – it keeps its sources clean.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no contradiction between the word God and the word Nature. People forget that religion is a kind of language we use to express our sense of mystery. It’s a way of giving coherence to thoughts and feelings that don’t always cohere. It points to thoughts and feelings. You shouldn’t take the word God literally. It doesn’t refer to a grey-haired man sitting on a throne in the sky. It refers to metaphysical feelings we all have at one time or another about our place in the universe. Just like the word Nature refers to the thing scientists and philosophers endlessly try to describe. Nobody knows the why and wherefore of our universe, Alfred, but we have a variety of ways to talk about it. And these ways sometimes compete with each other.