Matrix

by Lauren Groff

In the fields, the seeds uncurl in the dark cold soil, ready to punch into the freer air.

thus lost lazy Eden?

And she felt ebbing out of her the dazzling love that had filled those years in Eleanor’s court in Angleterre, that brushed even the difficulties and the loneliness in Marie with a fine and gleaming light.

for everyone knew beauty to be the external sign of god’s favor.

the buildings clenched pale atop the hill.

Star of the Sea,

Goda has the affronted air of someone who lurks in corners to hear herself spoken ill of so that she can hold tight a grievance to suckle.

Moths, Marie thinks. She is perhaps delirious.

This colorless place may be the afterlife, yet under the abbess’s hands Marie feels she is becoming human again.

it’s so confusing cause this writing here is not very good but then like 2 paragraphs later there’ll be a really awesome sentence. It’s weird

expensive windows filled with transparent horn that casts a waxy light into the room and makes it glow.

I saw the foot when she came to the abbey oh many decades ago and I had to wash it, it is a mangled horror, the abbess says, it is the stuff of nightmares. Hurts to this day like the flames of hell, Wevua says with satisfaction.

Decades thick, and visible, like the rings in a felled tree.

Another example

The noise, the brightness, the colors, the warmth.

Again

the women who are below in the silk-spinning room,

!!!!!!! Women and religion and silk!!!

It was love she felt in her, a love hard and sharp and fixed.

The world is blue with night.

The life of the abbey is the dream. The set of poems she is writing is the world.

At last she came to Marie’s mother, weeping, saying that she would rather die than be married. I would not mind it so much if I could be the hunter, the knife going into the flesh, but I will not be the prey. I will not lie there and let the knife go in and out of me, Ursule said.

It is because this prayer is enclosed within the chapel, she sees, not despite the enclosure, that it becomes potent enough to be heard. Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird’s because the chamber itself makes it so. Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer. So small, this understanding. So remarkably tiny. Still, it might be enough to live for.

Nuns already are suspect, unnatural, sisters to witches.

How strange, she thinks. Belief has grown upon her. Perhaps, she thinks, it is something like a mold.

again. In a jug she has steeped betony in aqua vitae and bids Marie rinse her mouth thrice with it, and spit into a basin until there is no more blood. Then she takes a little brush and paints the sore gum with honey and makes Marie sit with mouth gaping until the honey dries.

wind-shook branches,

Nest’s kindness to the fleshly body has brought about an inner shifting. Nothing is all stark and clear any longer, nothing stands in opposition. Good and evil live together; dark and light. Contradictions can be true at once. The world holds a great and pulsing terror at its center. The world is ecstatic in its very deeps.

a slow internal pouring of ecstasy.

yes, someday she will sit in silence until she knows god, she thinks, lying down in her bed to sleep. Just not now.

bodies are not naked here, bodies are bared only for the monthly bath, the night has eyes. But

The women gazed upon me in silence and with faces full of love. And when I could at last dare to fix my gaze upon them and did not dare to drag my eyes away, they raised their clasped hands and kissed. Let her kiss her with the kiss of her mouth. Thus they showed me that the war so often vaunted between them was a falsity created by the serpent to sow division and strife and unhappiness in the world.

Oh dear

Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all.

broom flower

For an abbey is collective; privacy is against the Rule, aloneness a luxury, time to think with all the necessary work and meditation and prayer too short to ever come to much. Even reading among the nuns is reading aloud; there is no private dialogue to challenge the internal voice and press it forward. Marie does not wonder why so few of her nuns have the capacity to think for themselves; she saw from the first moment she arrived that this was planted deep in the design of the monastic life. As abbess, she sees how dangerous a free-thinking nun could be.

Relevant

She laughs at her fear, which is still sending shocks of cold into her hands and feet.

the holy fire that whips and sears through her limbs and gathers in her throat and splits her sight.

The noise in the room is a low sweet hum without pause, the voices mixing so beautifully that the impression is not a tapestry of individual threads but a solid sheet like pounded gold.

In fact, the queen told Ursule the other day in a strange voice that she loves her too, but only like a sister, and this is why she has to send her away.

She tries to touch her sorrow in words, but it is like grasping at a cloud.

Instead as she rides, she thinks of god. It strikes her now that god must be most like the sun in the sky, which rises for the day and sleeps at night, endlessly renewing itself; and it is warm for it pours out its warmth and light, and yet at the same time it is coldly remote, for it continues on even as humans who equally fill the earth with life live and die, and it does not care either way, it does not alter its path, it does not listen to the noises on the earth beneath, it cannot stop to notice human life at all, it shakes off what absurd stories we try to pin to it and exists in calm as only itself, radiant and distant and meaningless.

With a rope, the subprioress ties the still-wet, still-bloodied stripped fleece of a stillborn lamb to an orphaned one, and the trembling baby touches the nose of its new mother, who gives a cry on smelling it that sounds nearly like a woman in pain.

The lock has been forcibly broken and it needs, Asta says gravely, three days to repair.

until the final death of the children of Eve with the apocalypse, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven angels, the seven bowls.

In 1208, a papal interdict falls over the land. Penance is to be inflicted as well on the healthy as the sick; for in the midst of life we are in death. No Mass can be celebrated, no bodies buried in sanctified ground. Only babies can be baptized, and extreme unction given at deathbed. There will be sorrow, horror, everywhere, and in all the cities the people will suffer, they cannot be confessed, they cannot take communion, the beloved dead will be left to rot and the air fills with the stink of their putrescence.

And I knew also that this would be the last of my visions. I feel them all gone. For I am all poured out like water. And all my bones are out of joint. And my heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me.

Some of it returns so vivid it is nearly a vision. Cecily, so young in the fields the days they fled the estate in Le Maine to Rouen, a sudden rainstorm, drops thick as spit, the horses urged to a trot as the rain came down hard, a field with hayricks, a tunnel into the dry interior of the haystack, where the girls squirmed out of their soaked clothing and pulled the woolen blanket over themselves, laughing at the closeness of the other body and the way their limbs knocked as they moved and the sound of the rain and the thick sweetness of hayscent. They lay back, pressed close for warmth, and Marie felt Cecily’s heart beating along the length of her, the pulse in her temple where it rested on Marie’s arm, and her smell was strong, the soap of lemon balm and lavender at the heart of her braid, skin with honey and wild onions and leaf rot in it. They had always rubbed together through their clothes, but they had never been naked like this; they would never have dared. Cecily blinked and her eyelashes brushed Marie’s arm. Marie held herself still, counting to a hundred. At a hundred, she would either move away or kiss Cecily. But at twenty-one, Cecily turned her head and pressed her lips to Marie’s throat and Marie lifted her hand and touched Cecily’s face, found her lips with her fingers, and there was no one there to see or stop them, no need for the breathless pulling away as the stable door cracked to sunlight and a silhouette was framed against the sky, nobody here below...

cup is filled with wine. Marie was not and could never be. Of course Marie did have a greatness in her, but greatness was not the same as goodness.

Tilde did not truly believe her abbess to have been an actual mystic. Mystics are ethereal creatures, and Marie was the opposite of ethereal. She was massive, fleshly, ruled by her hungers.