Matrix

by Lauren Groff

two voices weaving together in sad song of chivalric love, and she hears the pattern in this new thrilling kind of loving, sees it unfurling like cloth in the air: marriage is no excuse for not loving, one who is not jealous does not love, no one can be bound by two loves, love is always growing or diminishing, easy attainment of love is contemptible but impossible attainment makes it precious.

Humanity must be disintegrating to dust, the people of today paltry in comparison with what they had been a millennium before. The Romans, the Greeks, such giants compared with the Normans, or far worse, the paltry brittle-boned English. In a thousand more years humans will be as thoughtless as the cud-chewing kine of the fields.

Marie thinks that true we are not animals; but it would be foolish to think we’re better than animals.

She remembers a play of Euripides, how the true Helen of Troy was not in the besieged city during the long war, having been replaced there by a goddess-conjured figment; the true Helen was living in the sunlight and flowers of Egypt, far from bloodshed and the stink of death.

How? The only culture with Ancient Greek texts in this time would have been thousands of miles to the east

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

The field nuns are pulled off the reaping, the novices are set to work, the villeinesses sing because they do love a brawl.

Among the nuns at the abbey only Marie practices silent reading, and every time she does, it makes Goda shiver and protest shrilly at her witchy magic. Yet if there is no inner reading, how can there be any inner life? Marie thinks and imagines the cold blowing desert that must stretch inside her subprioress.

Marie likes to go down to the scriptorium and change the Latin of the missals and psalters into the feminine, for why not when it is meant to be heard and spoken only by women? She laughs to herself as she does it. Slashing women into the texts feels wicked. It is fun.

mouth and frees the babe to breathing. God laid the goodness into the world with her eggs. God’s Holy Spirit fills us with her breath and makes us live.