Matrix

by Lauren Groff

Her faith had twisted very early in her childhood; it would slowly grow ever more bent into its geometry until it was its own angular, majestic thing.

She is not built to thrive without others.

She found the captive bird’s song unbearable. It sang no inspired flights or strange tunes lifted from the hearts of other birds, it sang the same few songs the same few ways. Its imagination had been limited by the closeness of the walls of the room, the smallest tooth of sky seen through the window, the stifling inside air, the worms fed it one by one out of the hand of the queen.

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.

For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves.

Women in this world are vulnerable; only reputation can keep them from being crushed.

Marie thinks that true we are not animals; but it would be foolish to think we’re better than animals. Animals are closer to god, of course; this is because animals have no need of god.

She must draw up herself a dummy account ledger to show the abbey’s great debt, which is false, for, she considers, to counter corruption, a similar corruption is only logical and right. Small fires are used to battle a whole forest afire, she says aloud,

There is no mention of female sodomy in any of the books, and the great angry moralists would have mentioned it if it were a sin, surely. Marie has searched; she has found only echoing silence.

The irony of the male writers of the Bible not thinking to include women-on-women sex in the Bible not even to proclaim it a sin. Is it not seen as forbidden because it’s not violent? Or because there’s no power exchange or ownership involved? Did the men think sex required a penis and women, not having one, could not engage in it without a man? There’s definitely some commentary here on the male ego and the patriarchy and how its narrow definition of sex being only on heterosexual sex that they neglected to include any remonstration of lesbian sex.

Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.

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.

And without the flaw of Eve there could be no purity of Mary. And without the womb of Eve, which is the House of Death, there could be no womb of Mary, which is the House of Life. Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all.

Surely the queen had been too busy to write Marie, her sister. Half sister. And only by marriage, Eleanor says sternly.

So Marie is the half-sister by marriage to Eleanor? So was Eleanor’s husband Marie’s half brother?

But then Eleanor says that but of course if you put an eagle in a cage for more than a decade, she will try to peck your eyes out when you open the gate.

Then the queen says it is odd that Marie had thought of her often, that she must confess she hardly thought of Marie at all. Or if she did it was of a Marie when she knew her,

What women can do when given a task! Their abilities seem limitless.

Women act counter to all the laws of submission when they remove themselves from availability.

Scribe mihi, the queen has embroidered on the silk. An order, not a suggestion. To seal a letter with the abbey’s matrix requires either the prioress or subprioress to read and agree; what the queen is giving Marie with her own personal seal is a delicious and forbidden privacy.

All souls are limited in the circles of their own understanding.

Vision 1: Mary inspires her to build labyrinth Vision 2: Mary & Eve kiss - Queen Eleanor is coming Vision 3: Tree of girls - begin building abbess home

Prioress, subprioress, cantrix, sacrista, cellatrix, subcellatrix, almoness, kitchener, subkitchener, abbess’s kitchener, infirmatrix, subinfirmatrix, hostellerix, scrutatrix, mistress of scribes, magistra.

a shivering warmth,

They are not the kind of friends who love each other best when they are in the same place, riding the same fields. They, the queen writes, must be friends at a distance.

Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not. Skins are shed, and left at the roadside for the new young to pick up and carry on.

Confusion roils in their faces, for which is the lesser sin, to leave Mass, or to hear it presided over by a woman?

Slashing women into the texts feels wicked. It is fun.

The winter is a sheet of parchment that the small feet of birds, of vixens, of hares, write upon.

It’s always strange to find such carnality in such a renowned holy woman as the abbess.

All around, her sisters are rising, praying, baking bread, she can hear she is not alone in the world. She is terribly alone.

they complained that the poor should not be given for free what honest folk could not buy.

The last living exemplar of strange red salamander found only in this damp place is chased away from its hibernation nest and perishes, its guts pecked open by a bird.

Interesting how the author continues to highlight how Marie’s ambitions damage the natural surroundings.

Marie’s arrogance brought this final illness upon Wulfhild. Her endless hunger ate up the daughter of her spirit.

The need to enlarge this abbey she has thought of as an extension of her own body. Her actions always in reaction to the question of what she could have done in the world, if she had only been given her freedom.

And that very morning, riding in her grief back to the abbey, for the briefest of flickers she sees looming above the trees a great stone eagle the size of a mountain.

Collapse is the constant state of humanity,

Such comfort in knowing all the old cycles will turn again.

if you minister enough to any adult body, you will discover the frightened child hiding within it.

To think: All the hatred so deep inside Marie when she was young has, through the pressure of time, somehow turned to love.

Of the gifts of vision that the Virgin bestowed on me, it was the nineteenth and the sweetest because I understood when receiving it that it would be the last.

As this vision was of the radiant immensity of God brooding over the dark face of the waters, a great hen.

In fact, Cecily says, it was Marie’s unbeauty that was the making of her.

beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote to a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.

Open your hands and let your life go. It has never been yours to do with what you will.

True, there had been rumors of witchcraft; but such rumors are irrepressible when it comes to powerful women.